If I had been careful and cautious and watched what I had said, I would never have come to know about “The Club", and certainly I never would have become a member and enjoyed the bizarre privileges which membership gives. For years I've known that some of my ideas were definitely not acceptable to most people, so I have to be very careful of what I say even among friends. All that time it had never occurred to me that there was any chance of actually doing the things I had thought about. My problem was simply not to let people know what I thought about.

I suppose it was the three martinis before lunch that got me started, but it was just plain old-fashioned good luck that gave me the proper audience for my slip, and turned what could have been a terrible mistake into wonderful good fortune. John Murphy and I were drinking our lunch at the bar in a swank restaurant just off Madison Avenue, as happens every now and then when you are in my line of business. I'm in charge of advertising for a big company that is pretty well known, so I won't stick my chin out by mentioning its name. And John Murphy is a vice president of a well known advertising agency who that year was handling our account, — a matter running into millions of dollars. This meant that he was duty-bound to be extra nice to me and buy me drinks and laugh at my jokes and otherwise brown-nose me, so as to keep me wanting his agency to have our account. John and I have hit it off pretty well for several years, business-wise, even thought we know almost nothing about each other outside of business. I know he is married and lives somewhere up in Westchester with his wife and a couple of kids, and he probably knows that I am divorced and live alone in an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. Well, this day, after the third martini, and while we were waiting for the fourth to be delivered to our table, John excused himself to go to the men's room to take a leak. While he was gone, I idly picked up the early edition of the evening paper, and glanced over the headlines, just for something to do till he got back.