Minuard Foundation 2: The Foundation

I had a couple of thousand of the flyers printed up by my friend Lexi, who thought the idea was hilarious. She snagged a hundred or so and put them in a stack at the closest body piercing shop.

My first priority, I knew, had to be to collect as many calls as possible before Jim found out and killed us. I figured that if I could actually get him adopted by a houseful of strippers, or at least fought over by a few of them, then he'd be unable to get too bent out of shape at us. If you looked at it that way, we were doing him a favor, right?

So in order to collect as many leads as possible, I needed an answering machine message that kind of led people further into the snare. And this presented me with a quandary--how to link my phone to the flyer, without tipping Jim to what was going on? After a few days of mulling it over, I lost patience with the whole thing and recorded the following outgoing message:

"You have reached the offices of the Minuard Foundation. Currently all operators are conferencing with other donors. Please leave your name, number, and reason for calling, and the next available representative will return your call as soon as possible."

Thus was the Foundation born.

Over the next three weeks we distributed two thousand flyers to branch offices coast to coast (that is, people we knew in different cities) and around the city. Our friends were urged to tack them up wherever they thought appropriate (one dear, disturbed friend of ours just got a friend of his to put a stack of them by the outprocessing center at Chino, the maximum security prison in California). We had to admonish our local friends to keep this strictly under wraps from Jim, lest they ruin the surprise before it was ready.

We papered quite a few telephone poles with pleas to the better nature of whatever metalheads went there looking for the next hot band. We hit the other body piercing places, and I'm pretty sure a few of them made it to the bondage/head shop next to the strip of gay bars a couple miles away from the house. And to meet our goal of eventually raffling him off to a gang of bleached blonde strippers, we started spending a lot of time in those types of bars.

These were probably the best nights--I'd get off work around 9pm, Bob and I would shower, then hit two or three strip clubs. After a couple of nights of this, the girls from some of the bigger clubs knew us by sight, and would drag their girlfriends over to snag a flyer or two and sit in our laps. Around midnight, we'd cruise the areas closer to our house, and stick flyers under windshield wipers of cars til about one. At that point Bob would split and I'd head home to shower (again) and wait for the phone to ring. Soon enough, it started.