Love & Sex in Times of Corona

Dan I

He took a deep breath and looked around him one last time before closing the doors to his office. It felt as if he was closing the lid on a casket because he knew there was no way he was going to come back from this. For the past ten years, business had been dwindling. New patients became fewer and fewer and the ones that did come in did not need the elaborate treatment plans that paid the rent, his mortgage, fancy cars and young girls' needs.

It wasn't always like this. When he opened his first office in Manhattan, in 2001, the patients just flowed, gushing in like the overflowing fountain in Lincoln Square. It was a small affair, 600 square feet total, but business increased every year by 42 percent. He remembered that first year, just starting from scratch, he made 235,000 dollars. Back then, that seemed like a lot of money. Damm, nineteen years ago. How time flies! Then in 2002, $333,700 dollars, 2003, $473,854 dollars. And it continued until in 2004, when he realized he needed a new office because patients were standing in the small 80 square foot waiting area. And only having two chairs did not help the situation any. So he leased a large fancy new office in midtown with a fancy new price tag.

But that didn't matter, because in his first year in the new office, 2004, he managed to gross 798 thousand dollars, 946 thousand the second and by 2007 he was way past 1.4 million. By then, he had one associate and fourteen employees. The office was always abuzz, patients coming, patients going. The flow of patients back and forth gave it an energy of success.

Things were good.

But Daniel Lansdale DDS, had a few personal habits that would soon prove detrimental to his long term financial health. First and foremost was that he was, contrary to what he may tell you, an alcoholic. And as most experts will tell you, where there is alcohol, there are bad decisions. Most days after work, he would entertain friends at local bars or restaurants with nary a thought to cost, after all, he was a very successful professional.

Alcohol is a very expensive commodity if one is to consume it in commercial spaces. And Manhattan is an expensive place to be an alcoholic. Dr. Lansdale, being the social creature that he is, could be found, on most nights, hanging with friends in fancy places, drinking fancy drinks at very fancy prices. He could easily spend a couple of hundred dollars a night entertaining so called friends.

Of course, with this kind of generosity, he never lacked for friends.

Then there was that other little expensive habit Dr. Lansdale had. His predilection for young girls. Not underage girls, but those young things who basically are barely legal; the eighteen and twenty somethings who coincidently made up most of his front desk staff. He had a history of hiring them, seducing them and eventually having to let them go when they, for no apparent reason, decided that they didn't want to work so hard, took extended lunch breaks, came in late and wouldn't want to do the things a good receptionist should do. And he didn't limit his romantic endeavors to just his staff. He's been known to date a patient or two.

An alcoholic and a womanizer. Not a great combination.

And, even with those self-defeating habits, his dental practice flourished.

But, if there is one constant in life, it's that life is constantly changing, and in 2008, he was introduced to Mr. Murphy, of Murphy's law.

In 2008, the country took a hit with the recession that leveled the financial landscape. Dr. Dan, as his patients called him, was ill prepared for what was to come. Because his practice flourished organically from the start, he had no idea what to do after 2010 when the economy supposedly recovered. He found himself floundering, as did other health professionals, because now, he had to implement strategies he knew nothing about, marketing, internet presence, search engines, SEO's, Google, social media and on and on it went. Those businesses that had a handle on those things seemed to come out of the recession better than those that did not.

It's not that he was old. At 38, he was still a young man, but the natural growth of his practice along with his constant partying put him in a situation where he did not have time to, or more truthfully stated, did not care to learn proper business disciplines and now, found himself at a loss as to how to maintain the high income he had once enjoyed and the lifestyle it afforded him. The 1.4 million of 2007, quickly became 800, 000 in 2008 and 700,000 in 2009. And because, after expenses, he was not left with anything near what he enjoyed in the past years, he began putting off doing his taxes, so as to have more money in the here and now. One day he woke up in 2017 and realized he had not filed business or personal tax returns for seven years! When he calculated it, he figured he owed about half a million dollars, with penalties and all.

Over the years he hired consultants to help make his business successful again, but these proved to be a waste of time and money.

One may think that he may want to change his ways, But as with all addictions, he just delved deeper into it, drinking and womanizing, thinking perhaps that if he just drank more and seduced more young girls, his problems may go away.

Of course, they just magnified.

Where once, his fancy office with the fancy rent was abuzz with activity, he had to, in 2011 let his associate go and reduce his work force to just six employees. By 2017, he was down to just four employees. These were very humiliating and depressing times as everyday he would think back to the heyday of his business and now it was as if he had been at a spectacular party where everyone left and only he and a few stragglers remained behind.

At least two or three times a year, he'd receive eviction notices from the landlord because he was three months behind on a rent he could no longer afford.

At the zenith of his finances, he purchased a half a million dollar home in upstate New York, in a gated community, which were becoming all the rage at the time, with no money down, because, before the crash, banks were throwing money at him. He knew then that that wasn't the wisest thing to do, but with the money flowing, along with the alcohol, his thought processes were a bit skewed.

To make matters worse, his half million dollar home of 2007, was, after the recession, valued at only three hundred eighty thousand dollars. A loss of 120,000 dollars in equity. So he had in 2010, an outstanding 500,000 dollar mortgage on a 380,000 dollar home, what financial folks call being underwater on your home. He didn't care what it was called, he just knew he was in deep shit because now, he couldn't sell the house if he wanted to. If he did manage to sell the house, he would still have to come up with an extra 120,000 dollars to pay off the mortgage.

And where, back in the early 2000's, the hefty 4,300 dollar monthly mortgage payments didn't pose a problem, now that money was in short supply, it turned into the proverbial albatross round his neck.

With a half million dollar mortgage, declining income, a half million dollars in back taxes, which would only get worse with time, and an out of control drinking problem, Dan Lansdale realized he needed to change something in his life.

And so two and a half years ago, in the summer of 2017, he did it; he stopped drinking. Cold Turkey. Now he would turn his life around, be the captain of his ship. He knew it would take a while to turn this ship around, after all, it took him over twenty years to mess it up to the point where he was. And it was working, no more bad decisions, longer work hours and he even hired an office manager, not based on her looks, but rather, her experience. He began to learn some internet marketing strategies. 2019 saw him top 850,000 dollars. Dan Lansdale was back. By 2020, he surmised, he'll be on top of his world again.

Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit and he knew there was no coming back from this one. This will most likely be the final nail in the coffin, the nail that was long in coming.

As early as January of 2020, patients were cancelling their appointments and by March, when he had to close the office due to government mandated orders, he was only seeing two to three patients a day as opposed to the fifteen daily he normally saw.

He looked around one last time, set the alarm and closed the office door and at that moment, felt a little bit of his life ebb out of him.

_______________________