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emergency.
    The chaos of those fifteen-odd years since high school had passed for Aldo in an entrepreneurial blur: his retrofitted 1963 Airstream Trailer food truck (it crashed), his warehouse dance parties (shut down by police), his vending machines stocked with health snacks like gluten-free flaxseed bars and quinoa cakes (vandalized into disrepair), his prototype of a device that detected trace elements of peanuts in food (it simply didn’t function), his tanning-salon taxi service (customers sued for melanomas and motion sickness), his I’m Not Drunk, I Have Cerebral Palsy You Ignorant Fuck T-shirts (three sales in total), his maternity clothes for goths (a demographic with an 85 percent abortion rate). Not to mention the failures of his midlife-crisis consultancy clinic, his Mexican taco stand, his foam eyewear, his recycled soap, and his doggie dental mints and pawprint art. His product launches were all teachable moments: He never knew his market, he foisted poor-quality merchandise on customers he ignored. Who were his lenders? Where did he find these foolhardy creditors with no radar? His mother, Leila, was always good for start-up funds. So was his girlfriend, Stella. Uncles. Friends (myself included). State government small-business loans. Angel investors, men with crushing handshakes—overcompensation for prior accusations of limpness, Aldo assumed—who’d take new shirts out of their thick plastic envelopes and change right in front of you. I suppose in his mind failure was unimaginable, despite its persistent recurrence. Otherwise, why would he have blown his mother’s entire retirement fund, forty thousand dollars, to manufacture fashionable sandals in China? He didn’t have excuses or explanations, he had anecdotes: how he bought inventory in bulk upfront; how he arrived at the factory to find they’d made the whole lot out of a synthetic flammable material that irritates human skin; how on the way to a key meeting he was stuck in a historic traffic jam that lasted from nine a.m. until five p.m. the following day; his realization that the replacement supplier’s headquarters was in one of China’s cancer villages he couldn’t bring himself to enter. It went on like that. I remember when he came back from the debacle, he couldn’t face Leila; he called her from a pay phone in Chinatown every lunchtime for six months, pretending he was still in Shanghai.One afternoon Aldo and Stella were in the supermarket, and who does he run into in the frozen-food aisle? The look on his mother’s face was his lowest moment, he said, and he vowed, “I will never again try to make it big in this world! I will merely subsist!”
    So why didn’t he listen to himself? Two reasons. First, because Aldo was a precocious sucker of the success industry. He’d always be listening to motivational talks, lining the pockets of a succession of tacky gurus, Tony Robbins types, and once, Tony Robbins himself. He read books with obnoxious titles like See You at the Top and It’s Yours—Take It , and listened to audio-biographies of successful business leaders like Zig Ziglar and Warren Buffett and J. W. Marriott, Jr. He said things with an intonation that let you know he was speaking in quotation marks. He said: “Belief creates its verification in fact.” He said: “I’m the only asset I’ll ever have.” He said: “The prepared mind takes advantage of chance.” He said: “The secret to success is hard work.” I thought: It’s not much of a formula. The opposite is also true. Some failures work like bastards.
    The second reason was Stella: While he provided emotional support and material for her music, found her rare records and allowed her to use his wilder pronouncements as lyrics, she in turn gave him strength to believe in his ideas even when they weren’t inherently worth believing in. They were a genuine team, charmed