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ArtsBrother

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It is possible that you long time TUSCL members might remember my brother, the TUSCL member known as FarmerArt.

I am Art's oldest brother. Art died at Christmas, 2015 and I am executor of his estate. About six months after Art died I found his TUSCL laptop and learned about his rather extensive involvement with the strip club sub-culture in the last few years of his life. I had met two of Art's strippers, what you guys call OTC dates. This article is about one of those OTC dates, the stripper that Art called 'Toronto Sweetie' in the many stories that he told about her during his time on TUSCL.

Art received a terminal diagnosis about 18 months before he died and asked me to be executor of his estate. Art was a wealthy man and he knew that his estate was going to be a complicated business (it has been all of that). I took early retirement from my job and spent Art's last year with him as we prepared his financial, business, and personal assets for his. In a throw-away request to me Art asked me to give $250,000 to Toronto Sweetie. This was not a bequest in his will, just a request. Art told me that I would find a 'bunch of cash' in a safe in his basement. More about that cash later.

I agreed to Art's request. I treated it as sort of a 'death bed' promise to my brother. Art told me the stripper's real name, her phone number, her original nationality(Hungarian), the name of the club where he met her, and her post-stripper job plan. I had even met Toronto Sweetie once, at Calgary International Airport when I drove Art to meet her when they were going off to Hawaii for a winter vacation. She was an older woman - I would guess 40 or so - very attractive with a stunning voluptuous figure. She spoke heavily accented English and seemed possessed of a lively intelligence.

Back to that cash now. I was stunned when I opened Art's safe after he died. I had never seen such a pile of cash - $C, $US, EUROs, even a bundle CHF500 notes. Art never told me how he had accumulated the cash and that cash has been a curse to me as his executor. Much of the cash was old currency. e.g. all the US cash was $100 bills with the old smaller portrait of Franklin. I decided to give Toronto Sweetie her $250,000 in the form of those old $US100s. Art never told me why he wanted to make this gift to her. He even told me that she had dumped him a couple of years earlier. Perhaps he had feelings for her. Perhaps he was grateful for the pleasure she had provided him. I just don't know.

On my first trip to Toronto on executor business I tried to locate Toronto Sweetie. The phone number no longer worked so I went to Club Pro to get a line on her. More grief. A bartender and a couple of dancers remembered her but not the name that Art knew. They gave me a different name to seek out. My cursory search in Toronto for the two different names led me nowhere so I hired a private detective recommended to me by a Calgary friend who happens to be a cop. That was that, I thought. Not quite.

The private detective got exactly where I was at the end of my search - nowhere. He found no record of the woman anywhere in Canada under the two names that we had. This guy was a skilled detective, a retired cop with access to so many data bases that he made my head spin when he told me where he had searched for her. He even trolled the Hungarian immigrant community if Toronto to try to get a line on her. That turned out to be the key that unlocked the search. He was told that one of the names that we knew was more likely to be Croatian than Hungarian. So, he trolled the Croatian immigrant community and soon learned he was more likely looking for a Slovene. This knowledge inspired him to search for people who had traveled to Slovenia from Canada in the years after Toronto Sweetie dumped Art. Lord only knows how he did that. He came up with many possibles but finally winnowed them down to the most likely candidate. From there it was easy to find an address and phone number in Maribor, Slovenia.

With some trepidation I phoned the number to speak to the woman suspected to be Toronto Sweetie. I recognized the voice as we spoke from the one time that I had met her in Calgary. Even so, I quizzed her about some private things she would only know if she had been involved with Art as Art had related to me. She passed all the tests. I then told her that Art wanted her to have some money (not the amount) and that I would deliver it to her personally when I would be in Europe on vacation in January, 2018.

Getting that cash to Europe was my next worry. It would have been idiocy for me to carry it my baggage as I flew to Europe. I was heading to Sweden for Christmas with my Swedish relatives and I got a Swedish cousin involved in a small conspiracy. He agreed to accept the cash mailed to him and hold it for my arrival. The Swedish cousin also knew Art and had hosted him in Sweden previously. The Swedish cousin had also visited both Art and me in Canada. The cash made it to Sweden in the mail easily as I was sure that it would. I also knew that once I was in Europe in a Schengen country an elderly white male such as me would travel across other Schengen borders with virtually no chance of being detained by any border controls.

And so it happened. I crossed four international borders by car and train between Sweden and Slovenia with all that cash in my possession. I was not even once stopped by border control on the trip.

Meeting Toronto Sweetie was an anti-climax after all this. We met at a cafe in Maribor. I almost didn't recognize her. Gravity had done its inevitable work on her previously impressive bosom. Slovenian food had expanded her thighs and butt. It was obvious that a return to a job as a stripper was no longer possible for her. Her eyes gleamed greedily when she saw the pile of cash that I was giving her. She expressed no emotion when I told her the story of Art's death. She declined to tell me about all the various names she used. I was particularly curious how she traveled internationally with Art when Art didn't know her real name. I have traveled enough internationally to know that false passports are very difficult to get through sophisticated border controls. Again, she declined to tell me her story. All she said to me is....'My name is Pauela'. I had her spell it because she pronounced it - PO-AY-LA. I was unhappy with my encounter with Pauela. It left a very bad taste in my mouth and sadness in my soul. I should not have given her that money but I felt obligated to honour my promise to my dead brother.

I also wish Art had told me exactly why he wanted her to have this money. I have thought about this question a great deal. I think it highly unlikely Art was in love with her or even had any feeling for her. Art was about as hard bitten a businessman as you would ever meet. He was physically tough and he 'read' people well. He was a charitable man, however. He willingly shared his wealth with charities that did work that he respected. The best reason for giving money to Toronto Sweetie that I can come up with is just that - charity. He must have felt sorry for when her post-stripper plans all fell to shit.

I still feel bad within myself that I gave that money to that woman.