Sometimes it’s necessary to “speak one’s truth,” if only in the interest of total honesty and self-disclosure. It’s often embarrassing and takes courage, but if the record is to be complete this has to be part of it. And it’s not just around sexuality. There’s also a level of self-judgement that seems legitimate (the kind of thing for which people say you should have compassion for) — that since the financial collapse of 1989-90 my own self-confidence was effectively shattered and my horizons shrank.
Consequently it is only through writing — and work in the garden — that I can redeem such a life. A volume of failures, and of things left behind. Supposedly lessons to be learned, though I’m not sure for what purpose. Are things that much clearer now?
Looking back, I can say that the most successful period of my life was from the age of 20, when I entered university, through to the Victoria Park Plaza, which collapsed in 1989.
After that my confidence was badly damaged. We started Credex, and thought our pilot project could lead on to as successful mutual credit card, but could not sell it to any of the Canadian banks. Victoria got a job with a transformational consulting company in Flemington, NJ, and we moved back to the U.S. I promptly got pneumonia, which knocked me off my feet for six months. I became a stay-at-home dad. After another six months of outreach, I finally gave up on the idea of the credit exchange.
I turned my attention back to real estate, trying at first to become a commercial realtor, then getting into a disastrous partnership where I ended up with a nightmare house project to complete on my own. Victoria eventually helped me in the last days with the painting, and in the end we broke even. I had had enough of construction.
I then turned my attention to the internet, and began working with two unlikely partners, Marty Sobin and Lloyd Negoescu, on an internet startup. None of us were decent coders. We moved the family and the team from Flemington to Basking Ridge in 2000. We spent nearly four years developing a proof of concept, and by that time Amazon and Ebay were already the dominant players in the market we were trying to enter. Another disaster. The following year I played the stock market as a swing trader, making about $50,000. I think that may have been my last profitable year.
For several years I hung out with colleagues at the Institute for Sustainable Enterprise at Fairleigh Dickinson University, putting on a couple of green conferences and running an unsuccessful incubator program. In 2012 I discovered PACE. Victoria lost her job at Deloitte, worked for a year without compensation with David Rose, and then came to work with me and Gus Escher on C-PACE. We were warned it would take five years; in the end it’s taken ten and counting.
So what is my intention today? It’s certainly to do stuff with PACE in NJ once the program is finally able to be launched, even though I now realize that curbing building emissions is (a) difficult, and (b) insufficient. We need bioregional regeneration and a wholesale transformation in consciousness. So that’s where I am right now, piloting my own enterprise (this time a nonprofit) and getting basically nowhere.
Much better to write about my successful period — at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, getting a Commonwealth Scholarship to go to Canada, getting married for all the wrong reasons to Diana, and eventually breaking up with her after a year and a half in Toronto. A messy divorce, but I was on to an extraordinary adventure in Ottawa and a relationship with Louise that finally petered out around 1983, when I met Victoria.
During those ten years I was the golden-haired boy, rising in the ranks at Statistics Canada, then Consumer & Corporate Affairs, only to fall flat on my face again in a confrontation with the bureaucracy. I spent a year in Paris and then returned to Ottawa and started Sunwrights. That’s a mixed story. Fine buildings, terrible money and personnel management.
After several difficult years I believed my luck had changed; we’d found a way out of a half-million in debt, and I snagged a piece of property with $800,000 from the bank. My dream was to build a new kind of seniors’ residence, and with the help of some friends sold 93 out of 100 units before we’d even put a shovel in the ground. We stood to make $3 million, and would have done except for the S&L collapse in the U.S. and its repercussions in Canada. Standard Trust of Toronto disappeared overnight. The construction company we’d hired lost $50 million in projects, now even counting ours. I tried all of the avenues I could, including some shady ones with a Middle Eastern bank. Nothing worked. In the end an engineering firm that I had hired to do a study did an end run and took over the project, turning into a business hotel.
Two years later Victoria and I had to go bankrupt in Canada. Fortunately they did not pursue us in the U.S., and we never spoke of it openly afterward. A lapse of integrity nonetheless, and psychologically damaging. No longer would I ever take such a risk.