Chapter 16

CITYWALK

By early 1996, I'd been running Don's West Coast stores for a few months. Operations were smooth. Sales were good. Inventory was moving. Staff showed up on time, customers were happy, and the numbers looked solid.

I thought I had it figured out.

Then Don called. "Meet me at the new CityWalk location. But don't go near the store till I get there."

I drove over, curious. The store looked perfect—bright signage, fresh merchandise on gleaming fixtures, staff in brand-new uniforms rehearsing their pitches. Everything ready.

Don was standing about twenty feet from the entrance, partially hidden behind a planter. Sunglasses, casual clothes. He could have been any tourist.

"What are we doing out here?" I asked.

"Watching." He nodded toward the glass storefront. "Tell me what you see."

I looked inside. A young woman at the register—maybe twenty-two, blonde ponytail, bright smile. She was helping a customer,

demonstrating a product, laughing at something they said. Profes-sional. Engaging.

"She's doing great," I said. "Friendly, knows the product, making the sale."

Don didn't respond. Just kept watching.

The customer handed her cash. She opened the register, made change, closed the drawer. The customer left happy.

"See?" I said. "Perfect transaction." "Look again."

Another customer approached. Same smile. Same smooth process. Cash. Change. No receipt.

"I don't see anything wrong," I said.

Don's voice was flat. "She's not giving receipts."

I replayed the transactions in my mind. He was right. No receipts printed. No paper handed over.

"Maybe they didn't want them," I said. "Watch."

We stood there ten more minutes. Some customers got receipts.

Others didn't. The pattern was clear once I knew to look for it.

"No receipt means no record," Don said. "She rings it up for less and pockets the difference. Or doesn't ring it up at all. The numbers will show it. They always do."

I stared at the cashier. She looked so normal. So trustworthy. "How did I miss that?"

"Because you weren't looking for it." He turned to me. "Now you know what to look for."

Indiana Logic

I didn't understand it.

Growing up in Indiana, people were honest. If you gave someone a job, they did the job. That's how it worked.

But here, in these cash retail operations, I kept finding that people weren't honest. And it drove me nuts.

These weren't desperate people. They had good jobs. Fair pay. Don treated his employees well—better than most retail operations. And still, they stole.

The logic didn't make sense. But the evidence was undeniable.

The Procedures

I implemented procedures. Opening drawers with exact change counted and documented. Closing drawers the same way. Cash deposits verified by two people. Z-tapes reviewed daily. Inventory counts cross-referenced with sales records.

I did everything right.

And employee theft continued anyway.

Someone would steal a $100 item, walk it to a different store location, and get a refund. Cash in hand, no questions asked until I caught the pattern weeks later.

Cash disappeared from tills—covered by voids and no-sale transactions that looked legitimate on the surface but didn't add up when you dug deeper.

Inventory vanished despite tight controls. A box of merchandise signed for, shelved, and then just… gone.

Every time I discovered something, I felt like it was my fault.

I should have been there. I should have caught it sooner. I should have seen the pattern earlier.

Every missing dollar felt personal. These were my stores. My responsibility. My failure when something went wrong.

It wasn't customer theft—that was manageable, built into the margins. It was employee theft. The people I hired. The people I trained. The people I trusted.

And I couldn't control it.

The Z-Tapes

"Cash versus credit," Don said one afternoon. We were in the back office of the Universal CityWalk store, a cramped room that smelled like cardboard and stale coffee. He had Z-tapes spread across the desk—long ribbons of thermal paper covered in tiny print.

"What's the normal percentage for this location?" he asked.

I'd been studying these for weeks. "Seventy percent credit, thirty percent cash. Tourists use credit cards."

"Good. Now look at this one." He slid another tape across the desk.

I scanned the numbers. "Fifty-five percent credit, forty-five percent cash."

"What does that tell you?"

"Cash percentage is up. Either more people paid cash, or…" I paused. "Or someone's pocketing cash transactions."

Don nodded. "If cash goes up without total sales increasing proportionally, that's your red flag. Cash is coming in, but not all of it's making it into the register."

He showed me what else to look for. Too many voids clustered together. Refunds that didn't match return patterns. Till openings with no corresponding transactions—someone testing whether anyone was watching.

I got good at this. Really good. I could spot discrepancies that would have taken someone else hours to find.

"You're learning," he said. "Keep watching." So I did.

The Cost

I started watching everyone, all the time.

I'd review Z-tapes every night, comparing one day to the next, one employee to another. I'd check cash deposits obsessively, looking for patterns. I'd call stores randomly to verify procedures were being followed.

I couldn't turn it off.

Even when the stores were running well—sales up, customers happy, operations smooth—I was looking for what was wrong. What I'd missed. What someone was getting away with.

Finding problems became the job. Not running successful stores. Not building the business. Finding the theft. Catching the liars. Proving I was vigilant enough.

Every discrepancy felt like a test I had to pass.

I'd come home late most nights to the condo on the fourteenth floor. Museum-quality art on the walls. Expensive furniture arranged just so. The view overlooking Beverly Hills and Bel Air.

Success, from the outside.

But I'd sit at the dining table going over the day's numbers,

checking for discrepancies. Just me and the silence and the endless calculations that never quite added up.

Sometimes at the end of the night, I'd pour a glass of Chardon-nay. Just to try and relax.

The Silence

The quiet felt heavy. Not peaceful—heavy.

I'd look out at the city lights below, the sprawling grid of Los Angeles stretching to the horizon. All those cars, all those people, all that movement. And the silence of the condo felt loud.

I'd stand there thinking about what Don had taught me. Trust but verify.

It was a difficult concept for me. Because if you're always verify-ing, does that mean you don't really trust? To be good at this job meant watching everyone. Assuming something might be wrong until you confirmed it wasn't.

The numbers didn't lie. Numbers told a story that led you to a conclusion.

And once you learned to see theft everywhere—in every transac-tion, every employee, every discrepancy—you couldn't unsee it.

The loneliness of constant vigilance was just starting to settle in.

I didn't realize yet how deep it would go.

But I was beginning to understand the cost.

Don had taught me to see what most people missed. But once you learn not to trust anyone, there's a price.

The 14th Floor

One evening I came home and found a man sitting on my steps. A disgruntled employee. I didn't get out of the car. I waited, engine idling, watching him through the windshield. When he finally stood and walked away, I waited a few more seconds. Then I moved fast—out of the car, up the steps, key in the lock, door open, door bolted behind me.

Once Don heard about it, the decision was made. There was a security risk. And there were more and more meetings—the West

Coast operations had outgrown a patio facing a parking lot. The solution was Blair House.

Blair House rose thirty stories above the Wilshire Corridor, pale concrete and green-tinted glass catching the afternoon light. I pulled my red Mercedes into the semicircular motor court, and before I could shift into park, a valet was at my door. Keys handed off. Feet on smooth concrete. Glass doors sliding open.

The lobby was late-eighties money: polished marble floors, brass accents, a floral arrangement the size of a small child. The concierge nodded as I passed. The elevator was fast and quiet, carpeted, mirrored. The hallway on fourteen was hushed—thick carpet, soft lighting, solid doors with brass numbers.

Unit 1405.

Don had leased the condo from a Saudi prince and set it up as a corporate space—meetings and entertaining in the front, my private quarters in the back. I'd protested the arrangement. There was no way I could afford a place like this. They arranged the terms anyway.

The key-card system was strict. My card only took me to my floor, the pool deck, and the lobby. The security made sense once I learned who else lived in the building: Milton Berle, media figures, business executives whose privacy required near-military discretion. For a girl from Indiana who'd learned to walk through unlocked doors, the fortress felt both foreign and intoxicating.

The condo came partially furnished. Don and Marion sent the rest—the marble dining room table, the paintings from their collec-tion, works I'd seen in their home and the New York office, now hanging on my walls like borrowed history. I walked through the rooms slowly that first day, marble cool under my feet, trying to understand what I was looking at.

A living room with floor-to-ceiling windows. A dining room with the marble table and black leather chairs. A bar that looked like something you'd see in a fancy restaurant—marble countertop, glass shelves with mirrored backing, six seats where clients could sit for drinks. A kitchen with granite counters and appliances I didn't know how to use. A powder room with pillowed wallpaper—I'd never seen

that before, the fabric puffed out between seams like tiny cushions on the walls.

Floor-to-ceiling sliding doors opened to a terrace balcony that wrapped the entire unit—Bel-Air to the north, the green hills rising in the distance. The bedroom had two walk-in closets—more space than I had clothes to fill. An en-suite bathroom with his-and-her sinks, a jacuzzi tub, a separate shower, a separate toilet and bidet behind a private door. All marble. Everything marble.

Two covered parking spaces came with the unit. I never once walked down to get my own car. The valet always pulled it.

I locked myself out three times the first day. Called the locksmith until he knew my laugh.

Moving day carried a small humiliation I still smile at. I was in sweatpants and a ponytail, hauling boxes into my private wing, when someone knocked. My next-door neighbor—cardigan, prac-ticed officiousness, the kind of person who policed building order.

"I want to speak to the lady of the house," she announced. I set the boxes down. "I am."

She repeated it, slow and clipped, as if cadence could summon authority: "I... want... to... speak... to... the lady... of... the house." She made a little gesture with her hand, like a puppet was speaking for her.

I kept my hands on the boxes and softened my voice. "I am the lady of the house. But if you'd like, you may call me Lisa. What is your name?"

For a beat she had no line. The private corridor—the neutral carpet, the hum of the building—felt oddly conspicuous. She walked away stunned and later returned with an apology. She and her retired-doctor husband became neighbors who exchanged pleasantries.

The moment stayed with me. Not because of the apology, but because it revealed how other people's scripts tried to write me into a role I hadn't auditioned for.

There were only four condos on the fourteenth floor. One belonged to a famous producer in his eighties—I never spoke to him. One was empty. One was mine. And one belonged to the

neighbor and her retired-doctor husband. Once in a while they'd knock on my door and ask to use my fax machine. He had to send in worksheets for his medical license. That was the extent of our relationship.

The dining room had a view of the amenity deck. Through the window I could see the pool, the sun terrace, and the tennis court.

A tennis court. In a building on the Wilshire Corridor.

I lost first round at Wimbledon. Now I lived in a fortress with a tennis court visible from my dining room window. The universe has a sense of humor I've never appreciated.

I played sometimes. Corporate tennis. The same calibration I'd learned at the Riviera with Mr. Takahashi—play well enough to win, but never over-hit, never humiliate. Precision without cruelty. Strength without spectacle. Tennis that wasn't tennis. Tennis that was business in a different costume.

Louis Schure came out from New York once. He'd worked with Don years before on 3D image technology. He also owned a tennis club. We played nice corporate tennis. He went back and told Don he thought he could beat me.

The next time he visited, we played again.

I didn't hit winners right away. I hit a dropshot, then a lob. Dropshot, lob. Putting the ball just slightly where he had to sprint for it. Back and forth, corner to corner.

He ended up with bloody knees and a sprained ankle.

The pool I used more often. A large chlorine pool on a raised terrace, lounge chairs arranged with geometric precision, the hum of Wilshire traffic far below. I'd go up in the late afternoon when the light was soft and the deck was empty.

It was always empty.

A building full of surgeons, entertainment lawyers, foreign exec-utives, older couples who'd downsized from estates in the hills—and I was the only one floating in that water. I was the youngest person living there by about thirty years. I don't think I ever saw a child except maybe someone visiting grandparents over the holidays. Sometimes there'd be another person in the gym. We'd nod. Keep

our headphones in. Pretend we weren't both alone in a building designed for people who had everything.

I was rushing out of the elevator one morning—designer suit, heels, purse—mind already three meetings ahead. The doors opened and I clocked someone on the shoulder. Hard. He spun halfway around.

His wife had him by the elbow on the other side. If she hadn't been holding him, he would have fallen.

Tan raincoat. Hat. Big glasses. Cigar. Milton Berle.

"I am so sorry—"

He looked at me. Steadied himself. "Ok, kiddo."

And they stepped into the elevator.

That was probably one of my few encounters with a resident of the building.

The condo was never empty. That was the thing.

People came through constantly. Business. Meetings. The machinery of Don's West Coast operations running through my living room. I was the gatekeeper now—the quiet barrier that filtered requests, coordinated logistics, held the thin line between access and exploitation. If someone wanted Don, they came through me first. What is this regarding? Who are you and what do you really do?

There was an inner circle, then a slightly larger ring around it. Think of a drop striking still water—if you're not in the first few circles, you never break the surface. My job was to read those circles. Protect the center. Keep the wrong people out.

The work taught me things. Vetting callers became triaging vendors. Sketching boundaries turned into scheduling deliveries. The instinct to protect the center turned into the discipline of execution. I learned how to hold a door closed and how to move the machinery behind it.

But here's what I didn't notice until later: all those people coming through, all those meetings, all that activity—none of it was for me.

The dining room had a marble table that seated eight. Black leather chairs. A window overlooking the tennis court. It was designed for dinner parties, for entertaining, for the life that was supposed to come with a building like this.

I never sat there.

I ate in the kitchen, standing at the counter, reading documents. Or at my desk, phone pressed to my ear, picking at takeout while I talked to New York. The marble table stayed empty. The black leather chairs stayed pushed in. The tennis court stayed visible through a window I rarely looked through.

The views from the living room were stunning. Bel Air to the north, the green residential streets climbing into the hills. Beverly Hills spread out below. On clear days, you could see all the way to Century City, the twin towers catching light. At night, the city became a grid of warm lights stretching to the horizon.

I'd stand at the window sometimes, after the meetings were done, after the calls had ended, after the last person had left. The marble was cold under my bare feet. The paintings watched from the walls. The silence was enormous.

This is success, I'd think. This is what it looks like.

And then I'd pour a glass of wine and sit at my desk and work until I couldn't keep my eyes open.

Under the bright surface, something was hollowing out.

I wanted to belong and feared someone would point out I didn't. I started going out more—dinners, drinks, the rehearsed conviviality of being seen. Industry parties where everyone asked what you were working on. Restaurants where the tables were arranged so you could see who else was there. The choreography of Los Angeles, where proximity was currency and visibility was survival.

I learned quickly that much of the attention was for access, not for me. People wanted to know what Don was working on. People wanted introductions. People wanted to be in the first circle, and they thought I could get them there.

I tried to keep the friends separate. People I knew outside the work. People I went to dinners with, picked up tabs for, people I thought were there for me rather than for what I could do for them.

But when I came home at night, the condo was quiet. The marble table was empty. The tennis court was dark. The pool was still.

I taught myself to rollerblade through the condo. The marble floors were perfect for it—smooth, cool, endless. I'd push off from the living room, glide past the dining table I never used, grab onto a chair when I needed to slow down, loop through the kitchen and back. The paintings watched. The city glittered through the windows.

And I rolled through the empty rooms like a kid in a museum after closing, making the space my own because no one else was there to see me behave like a normal twenty-eight-year-old.

Mickey

Balzac Balloon Ball was already a hundred-million-dollar story in mass merch, but my world lived in the edges—the kiosks, carts, stand-alone stores, and the small, fierce shop-in-shop that made strangers stop. The product was simple: a balloon inside a cloth sac. Put the balloon in the buttonhole and blow it up. The balloon takes on the strength of the fabric cover—looks like a regular heavy rubber ball but plays like a bouncy balloon.

I was running over fifty locations worldwide—stores and kiosks. Some were company-run, others were run by distributors I trained, from operations to sales. That's why I got the call for Universal.

Richard Speer wanted to be the brand's southeast distributor. One call and I was on a plane to Orlando.

Don, Richard, JT (John Thomas), and I formed the crew: a mix of politics, capital, and muscle that I was learning to translate into operational results. On paper my brief looked brutal: hire and train the staff, stage interviews, design the floor, build the flow, and turn volume into choreography.

I set up interviews in a hotel suite near SeaWorld. Interviewees arrived like a parade of possibilities: hopeful, bored, theatrical. One woman walked in with three-inch nails and a résumé; before I could ask a question, she said, "I don't do hangers."

I said, "What?"

"I don't do hangers," she repeated, throwing her bedazzled manicure in my face.

After a few questions I told her thanks, we'd let her know and moved on to the next person.

We opened at Universal Studios Florida, inside Fievel's Playland.

The area was designed to make you feel mouse-sized. Giant cowboy boots towered overhead. Oversized Sunkist cans. Huge wooden barrels with water cascading into enormous cups and cowboy hats. Sardine tins the size of cars. Everything scaled up, everything playful, everything chaos.

Balzac fit perfectly. Our giant balls—three feet in diameter, stacked on poles, bouncing across the plaza—didn't look out of place. They looked like they belonged. In a world where everything was oversized, a kid running past with a massive bouncing sphere was just part of the scenery.

The setup was simple: wooden carts as the base, giant balls on tall poles as attention-grabbers you could see from across the park, smaller balls for sale on the cart itself. Demonstrators bouncing, tossing, engaging kids. The spectacle was the point. Stack them high. Make it impossible to walk past without stopping.

Training was learning lines and being friendly. You just had to get the ball in the hands of the customer.

I forgot to tell them: have some common sense. Don't toss the ball to a group of seventeen-year-olds—you will never see that ball again.

One guy—mid-thirties, came from Rent-A-Center—kept forget-ting the objective. I told him to get out there and get the ball in kids' hands. He grabbed a ball three feet in diameter and threw it to a group of eighteen-year-olds. They ran off with it. He had to chase them through the park. We called Foxtrot—Universal security—and they got it back.

After that, we were more specific about which kids.

I was showing a little girl the ball—how light it was, how it bounced. Don came up and started teasing me about something,

trying to be funny. The little girl looked at him and said, "You're a meanie," and stomped on his foot.

Kids would play with the Balzacs and sometimes the younger ones would start crying when the parent didn't buy one. The parent would inevitably say, "What's your cheapest one?" And then some-times they'd come back a day later: "We bought this the other day in the other park. We want to bring some home as gifts."

That was the floor. That was retail.

Richard was the operational spine. When lines backed up, he didn't call for someone. He opened another register and started scanning. A stranger leaned in and said, "Boy, I'm gonna make you a millionaire."

Richard smiled, said, "Yes, sir," and kept working.

The first day we had so many sales we ate the tax—there was no time to make change. The next day we brought in another register. The third day we brought in a backup.

Universal noticed. Disney noticed.

Disney wanted Balzac in their parks. The deal was twenty-five cents per cap—twenty-five cents for every person who came through the turnstile.

Going into Disney wasn't a wild pivot; it was the same music played louder. The stakes shifted—heat, queues, strollers, costume-clad chaos that demanded a pitch work in five seconds—but the measures stayed true: you have one of the best products. Now teach the staff to sell with speed, excitement, and warmth. The numbers would tell us whether those rules held.

I was coming down to meet Don in the hotel lobby when he looked me up and said, "You can't wear that."

I laughed—new Sutton shoes, a skirt I'd worn a hundred times in L.A.—and he shook his head.

"Your skirt is too short. You don't wear that to Disney. You're not in Los Angeles."

The correction landed like a palm on the back of my neck: context changes how you're read, and every venue has its own grammar.

Disney had a city underneath the park. The Utilidors—a grid of

tunnels wide enough for cars, food carts, parade crews. Cafeteria, medical center, costume department. Everything hidden so guests in Tomorrowland never saw a cowboy from Frontierland walking to work.

I used to love hugging the characters at Disney. Until I saw them off-stage. A skinny guy drenched in sweat, the giant head tucked under his arm, smoking a cigarette.

I never hugged another character after that.

Richard wanted operations; Don owned the brand. That divi-sion turned every decision into a negotiation. JT and I were on the phone constantly—frictional, pushing back on each other's calls.

The day Don arrived at Disney the tension made itself visible. Don stepped out of the car and Richard greeted him with the easy handshake of two men who'd grown through deals together. I was bent over papers in the backstage clutter when JT shoved my shoul-der, leaned in, and barked, "Son of a bitch!"

He jabbed a finger toward Don and Richard.

"Goddammit, look at this—these two are gonna come up with a solution that both of us could have done, and they're gonna make the peace and say we're idiots."

I laughed, rolled my eyes, and kept reading.

Ten minutes later Don and Richard came back with hugs and handshakes. The diplomacy took ten minutes. The work took the rest of the day.

At Disney the registers got so hot from volume they had to swap them out. Disney worked the registers themselves to keep the lines moving.

We'd started with two carts at Epcot. Two months later we added a third. By the end we had eight locations across Disney—Epcot, Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, the Marketplace. At Universal we'd taken over Fievel's Playland.

I saw what was missing. Bought some Disney T-shirts and made samples—mockups of what Balzac balls would look like with Mickey, with Ariel, with Buzz Lightyear. Technically a no-no. You can't mess with Disney images without permission. But Don saw them. We sent photos to Disney.

That's how Mickey ended up on a Balzac ball.

Twenty-five cents per cap. Disney volume. Disney characters.

The Son of the Source

I'd already written about respect and access. We coined another phrase for those who had access by birth: the Son of the Source—the children of high-powered people who walked through doors because their parents could open them.

Everyone does this at some level; millionaires and billionaires just do it louder. The difference is the shift in power and the pres-sure on a son or daughter to outdo, or at least match, a parent who already sits at the top.

Most can't, and some don't even try.

I saw it at the Balzac locations. A regional manager's son held the title while I did the work. When he walked into a room the air went thin—no energy, no ownership.

Once, when sales dipped and Donald asked him, "What do you have to say about it?" he shrugged and said, "What does it have to do with me?"

He meant it.

That sentence empties a meeting.

Power looks different depending on who holds it.

Don fired a Walton heir because he held a kind of authority most people didn't. The lesson landed: pedigree is not a shield if the person beside you is willing to use their power.

Then there are the other kinds.

Remember Richard Speer at Universal? The man at the register, scanning items, saying "Yes, sir" to a stranger who didn't know who he was?

His father Roy founded Home Shopping Network. Richard ran it—not a figurehead, not a title holder. Thousands of employees reported to him. Real operations. Real authority.

And he was working a register at a Balzac cart because the line was backing up.

That's the difference.

Two people arrive at the same door on different currencies: pedigree versus armed willingness.

Son of the Source isn't a put-down; it's an observation with teeth. Given a door, heirs either learn to hinge it or treat it like a cushion.

The rule was simple: give someone a measurable problem and see who shows up.

The results rarely flattered privilege alone.

Pro Foamer

We'd shown we could turn retail theater into reliable revenue.

But Don wasn't interested in consensus or focus groups—he trusted the product and trusted that a loud promotion would move it.

He imagined the stunt; I was the operator who had to call agents, chase notarizations, and make the spectacle real.

Don called it the Pro Foamer: a soft piece of engineering dressed as a toy.

Imagine a spongy ball that wanted to be serious—a foam inte-rior shaped like a football, wrapped in a slick, non-porous skin with a small opening so you could add water to change the weight. Empty it flew light; filled, it behaved like a regulation ball.

Don wanted spectacle, an NFL name, and a headline.

Keyshawn Johnson, the No. 1 draft pick, was the player suggested.

Don told me to call Isaac Stone. I'd never spoken to Isaac before; making that call felt like stepping into someone else's room. I explained the stunt—the Guinness Book of World Records angle, the guaranteed press, the controlled narrative—and Isaac liked the idea of Keyshawn being tied to one of Donald's products.

With the agent's nod, the stunt moved from fever dream to paperwork.

Keyshawn was everything the press promised: 6'4", long-limbed, compact where it mattered—broad shoulders, a big smile, a face that read like proof on a Sports Illustrated cover.

We pitched it cleanly: drop a Pro Foamer from a plane at a few thousand feet, have Keyshawn catch it on the ground, certify the moment with the Guinness Book of World Records, and call it the longest received pass in history. Isaac saw the brand lift; Don loved the spectacle. My job became the grind of making it real.

Getting Keyshawn to sign was a logistical chase. He ran from party to party; notarization was a moving target. One night he called from Las Vegas, apologetic and a little frantic—he'd tried to get the contract notarized but had no ID.

He laughed, embarrassed, when he told me he'd tried to use his Sports Illustrated cover as ID.

We waited a day, got his license, secured the signatures, and thought we were clear.

Then safety intervened. The agent asked the obvious hard ques-tion: what if he breaks a finger catching something dropped from a plane? Liability ballooned into career-ending scenarios.

Don's answer was equal parts practical and reckless: "Fine. Lisa will do it."

The room stilled; then plans snapped into place.

I recruited Olivier and Tunde from the Balzac store at City-Walk. Olivier was French; Tunde was Nigerian. They'd been working together for a while, and for me for months—tall, long-legged, joking men who looked athletic enough to be useful.

I found an abandoned military strip outside Los Angeles and a pilot who took odd jobs. The airfield smelled of jet fuel and sun-baked tarmac; the hangars yawned like metal mouths.

Inside the plane the metal was warm under my palms; the pilot checked gauges with a steady thumb. There wasn't a window to open—only the door. The pilot asked if I was OK with the side door being open. I said yes, as long as I was tethered to something.

I'd gone skydiving a few years before, while I was in law school, because my boyfriend said there was nothing to do in Michigan. The pilot suggested I clip into the harness in case I fell out.

When we took off, the noise was massive—so loud I couldn't hear myself think. I checked the tether a few times before I got anywhere near that open door.

On the first run I tossed Pro Foamers one by one. Hollow foam beneath slick skins, light and unpredictable, they looked like pale moons against the blue. Each one tumbled in a slow wobble and landed farther apart than I guessed.

On the ground Olivier and Tunde stood with hands on hips, watching as if the falling toys were someone else's problem.

We landed. I asked flatly, "Why didn't you run for them?" Tunde grinned. "I don't play FUT-bol. I play BASK-et-ball."

He looked at me like the task wasn't in his job description.

Olivier didn't laugh. I thought it was funny.

So I changed the plan. I sent Tunde up with the pilot to try throwing while I stayed on the strip to watch landings. Before he climbed in I reminded him to hook into the harness; he rolled his eyes, clipped in anyway, and went up.

From below the view was strange: soft glossy shapes skittering toward earth on odd arcs.

Then I told him to dump them all at once. He spilled ten Pro Foamers like a fan from the doorway, slick skins catching sunlight. Olivier and I ran in circles, looking toward the sky and trying not to run into each other.

Three tries in, I found myself sprinting and looking up at the same time—all of these footballs falling to earth. I just had to catch one.

I didn't try to catch it with my hands. I didn't play football either. I cradled it with my body like it was an egg.

The impact was a hard thud. Olivier and the onlookers cheered. But the agent's fear returned: "What if a catch breaks a finger?"

The stunt that would have put Keyshawn's name on the box folded under liability.

Keyshawn did not catch the Pro Foamer.

But we had the photograph: me in red, a Pro Foamer in my arms, a plane yawning above an empty runway.

Real Boxer

Don had invented color-changing fabric. He'd worked with Giorgio di Sant' Angelo. He looked at the leisurewear market and said there had to be a change.

Real Boxer® was his idea. He trademarked the name and the tagline: "Because every day is a fight."

He handed it to me.

"You're an athlete. What do you like? Why don't you send me some things that you think would work?"

That was it.

I had no idea what I was doing. So I started with what I knew: my own closet.

I looked at what I had, what was in the stores, why some things worked and others didn't. I had samples made with the logos up and down the arm, shifted across shoulders, cut in different places.

I needed photos for presentations, models wearing the gear, so I recruited people from my gym. Wannabe actresses, trainers, anyone who said yes.

I sent the pictures to New York. Don called.

"What's wrong with this guy?" "What do you mean?"

"He doesn't look right. There's something with his eyes. You should be careful of him."

I had no idea what he was talking about. The guy was a trainer.

I saw him all the time.

A few weeks later he invited me to a club on Sunset. I went. It was a little shocking. Dancers in cages wearing S&M outfits. And there he was—leather pants, something that wasn't a shirt. He didn't look like a trainer anymore.

I found out later he was a trainer and a porn star and into S&M.

Don had sized him up from a photograph. I'd spent months at the gym with the guy and had no clue.

This isn't Indiana.

Lucia Rijker — The Most Dangerous Woman in the World

Harlan brought Lucia around. He thought she'd be perfect for Real Boxer®. We'd trademarked it by then—the brand, the concept, everything. The tagline was "Because every day is a fight." And Lucia Rijker was 36–0 in kickboxing with four world titles. They called her the most dangerous woman in the world.

She was transitioning to boxing then, training under Freddie Roach, living in LA. Buddhist, disciplined, focused. When we met to talk about the project, she didn't waste words. She understood what we were building. She was in.

The hot yoga happened a few weeks later.

Lucia invited me to join her at the Bikram Yoga College of India in Beverly Hills. We were taking a class from Bikram Choud-hury himself. I'd done yoga before—regular yoga, the kind where you can breathe. I walked into the room and the smell hit me imme-diately. Carpet. Sweat. Heat that felt like it had been sitting there for years.

There were about twenty people in the class. Lucia was already there, stretching near the front. Not an ounce of fat—just muscle, the kind that comes from discipline, not vanity. When she saw me, she flashed a huge smile, warm and genuine, completely at odds with her reputation.

I must have made a face because she looked over and said, very calmly, "You need vapor rub."

I stared at her. "For what?"

"Under your nose. So you don't smell the room."

She handed me the little tin. I dabbed some on. It helped.

We went through the class together, two athletes in a room full of people trying to sweat out their stress. Lucia moved through the poses with the same precision she brought to everything else. No wasted motion. No complaint. Just work.

I recognized it. Tennis had taught me that same single-minded focus—the kind where you tune out everything except the task in front of you. Watching Lucia, I saw it immediately. She wasn't just strong. She was committed in a way most people never understand.

That's what made her perfect for Real Boxer®. She didn't repre-sent the tagline—she lived it.

We worked together for about six months. Appearances, photo shoots, training sessions. She was professional and reliable. Every-thing Joseph hadn't been.

Then came the Diana Dutra fight.

August 28, 1999. Hard Rock Casino in Vegas. Lucia won by TKO in the third round. On paper, another victory.

But she'd suffered a broken eardrum.

Bob Arum dropped her not long after. He preferred Mia St. John—more marketable, he said. Easier to promote. Lucia disap-peared from public view. Stopped taking calls. The project folded.

I understood it. When you've built your life around discipline and control, what do you do when your body betrays you? When the thing you've sharpened into a weapon suddenly has limits you can't train through?

Lucia Rijker was said to be the most dangerous woman in the world in the ring. But some fights you win and still lose.

I never saw her again after Vegas.

The vapor rub trick, though—I still use it sometimes. Small mercies in absurd situations. You take them where you can.

I made the samples and sent them to New York. Don brought in some people.

The project kept moving.

The next thing I heard, Real Boxer® was going to be the house brand of Wards.

It was amazing to watch—my little samples to prototypes to full-scale production, everything happening in New York while I was still in Los Angeles.

Real Boxer® did $30 million in six months. It was outselling Hanes.

Farting Beanies

The toy craze was everywhere—Beanie Babies stacked in windows, dangling from backpacks, traded like currency on playgrounds. And in the middle of that cultural storm, Buddy and I decided to make the one thing the world didn't know it needed:

A farting donkey.

I booked the studio for the week, got the engineer lined up, and walked Buddy into the booth like we were about to record a Grammy-winning album instead of… this.

Inside the dim studio, Buddy slipped on the headphones, tapped the mic, and grinned at me through the glass.

"Alright," he said, "let's bring this donkey to life."

He launched into it immediately—one-liners, punchlines, then a fart noise. Another joke, another fart. A rhythm. A system. A man committed to the craft.

After a while, I clicked the talkback button. "Buddy… can we try something?"

He froze mid-raspberry. "What? You don't like my farts?"

"I mean… they're fine. But they're all the same. We need real farts. Juicy ones."

He stared at me. Then he cracked—full-body laughter, head thrown back.

"You want juicy farts?" "Yes," I said. "Like this."

I pressed my palms to my mouth and unleashed the most outra-geous, echoing, theatrical fart sound the studio had ever heard. Buddy doubled over. I doubled over. The engineer slid out of his chair, wheezing.

We spent the next hour playing Guess Who Farts Like This, assigning fart styles to everyone we knew—executives, friends, celebrities—each one more ridiculous than the last. It was chaos. It was art. It was us.

At one point, Buddy wiped his eyes and said, "Lisa… I always liked you. I always loved you. But after today? I really love you."

Six weeks later, the samples arrived.

I walked into my building and headed for the mailroom—a 500-square-foot space where Ben, the mailroom attendant, handled all the mail and shipments. He worked behind an open half door, pack-ages stacked on shelves behind him.

Before I even got there, Ben spotted me through the door like he'd been waiting all day.

"Is that your box?" He pointed at a big 2' x 2' package. "Please tell me that's your box."

"Yeah, that's mine. Why?"

He exhaled like he'd been holding it in for hours.

"Please take it. Please. I've been trying to tell people all day it's not me."

"What's not you?"

He pointed at the box like it was cursed. "The farting. Every so often it just… goes off. And then someone laughs. And nobody believes me."

Right on cue, he lifted the box to hand it over the half door. PFFFFFTTTTTTTTTTTT.

A long, juicy, unmistakable fart echoed through the mailroom—followed by Buddy's recorded laugh, bright and delighted, like he was right there with us.

Ben closed his eyes.

"See? That. People think it's me." I took the box, trying not to laugh.

Farting Beanies had made it into the world. And apparently… it had already made an impression.

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