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Damien Rumsford jumped ship after one meeting with the man who sold Mountain Valley to the White House. Damien was more interested in peasant girls than actually breaking new ground for an expensive, exclusive product no matter who drank it and what the eventual health benefits may be—natural spring water in glass bottles—3500 year old natural spring water from deep in the earth’s bowels, excreted into a state of the art bottling plant where the earth’s best medicine is bottled at the source and trucked at great expense all over the country to distributors and sub-distributors to be distributed to consumers and retailers. I was getting my faith back. I didn’t understand why Damien jumped ship. I was given the exclusive territory of the DELMARVA Peninsula—for free. They even promised to give me leads when people called in to order. I came up with a few thousand dollars and picked up a load of water in the back of my father’s old station wagon and went to work. He would have been proud. I started in June of 1985. It was summer and people drink water.

The Trilon Hotel was a short walk North of Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame and charged $55.00 a week for exclusive accommodations. I only recall a woman’s head appearing when a wooden flap opened after I tapped on the bell three times when I entered the clean empty room from outside under the Trilon Hotel sign. The room was freshly painted light green. I only recall the woman’s head when she allowed me through the door after a short interview and showed me a clean room with a single bed, a chair, two small tables, a chest of drawers, a lamp and a bare light bulb overhead.
“Sylvester Stallone wrote some of ROCKY while he was living here,” she told me. I tried to imagine what scene the Trilon inspired. A community room with a table, stove and refrigerator was across the hall. The bathroom and shower were right next door. My window on the ground floor overlooked a small asphalt parking area. I folded after eight weeks of uninspired living, retrieved a mini van from a drive-away service and drove back to Baltimore where I brainstormed with Damien Rumsford on setting up flower carts and having girls in peasant dresses sell flowers and bottled water. I found a source for Evian in the Baltimore area through the library information service and that’s when I learned about Mountain Valley Water from Hot Springs, Arkansas and Ronald Reagan’s fondness for it in the White House. He had just started his second term. If my lifestyle had allowed more time for TV and News gathering I may have bailed on the whole idea of bottled spring water. My future supplier wasn’t that great of a salesman—I had to prove to myself I could become a capitalist since the Art thing was for me for it’s own sake. Living creatively still took cash flow to make it go.