Bang! I stare up at the ceiling. For much of my life, Musclini has been angry. In addition to the bulk-mail factory and the chain of Laundromats, he owns a small apartment building. His anger stemmed from people who broke washers and dryers or jammed the coin slots with slugs. From the apartment repairs he constantly had to pay for and tenants who were behind in their rent. Angry that sometimes he had to take them to court, and even angrier when he himself got taken to court. It was hard for me to understand why anyone would want to be involved in businesses that caused so much grief.

But next to winning tennis tournaments, the thing that makes Musclini happiest is embarking on new business ventures that he imagines will make us “golden.” With each new venture, the paterfamilias convinces himself that he knows something that will make the property or business much more profitable for him than it is for the current owner. I’ve never understood how, only being familiar with a property or business for a few weeks, the paterfamilias can believe that he knows more than the person who’s owned the property or run the business for decades. But back in the days when he spoke to me about such things, he’d insist that all we had to do was increase capacity by 50 percent, add two stories to the property, get the current tenants out, remodel the place, and raise the rents. (It was always “we,” as if in his mind I was a junior capitalist tool in training.)

Invariably, all we had to do turned out to be a huge headache, if not downright impossible. When he bought the bulk-mail company, he told me that all we’d have to do was add a dozen more inserters and the investment would pay for itself in five years. But it turned out that state occupancy laws prevented him from doing that. (Despite that, he must eke a small profit out of the operation or he would have gotten rid of it by now.)

The poignant irony is that while the paterfamilias imagines himself to be a corporate bigwig, for years most of the money he’s made has come from the chain of Laundromats — a business he more or less stole. A friend of his from college built the Laundromat business and had a dozen of them spread out around the New York area. The man had no family, and when he got cancer, he sold the operation to the paterfamilias. More than once I’ve heard the paterfamilias brag that he bought the chain “for a song,” as if he were some sort of entrepreneurial genius and not simply an opportunistic dick who took advantage of a dying friend.