As fate would have it, on the day Arthur Durch was sentenced to prison, his mother was too. Upon hearing the news of her son’s being sent to jail, Edna Durch suffered a severe and debilitating heart attack and was sentenced to life in bed. The heart attack occurred in her lawyer’s office. She had gone there to strike her black sheep son Arthur from her will, but before she could, she had the attack. The jolt of her massive heart attack caused Mother Durch to slump across the family lawyer’s desk, knocking various writing implements over and staining his expensive tooled leather-top desk with an overturned bottle of ink. According to the extremely superstitious lawyer, his expensive gold pens and pencils and desk were jinxed by the dead woman and unusable forever. He had them all replaced.

The bed Edna Durch was doomed to stay in was located in the master bedroom of her duplex penthouse apartment on the fiftieth floor of the Trump Grosvenor House. It was the only penthouse apartment at the very top of the building at Eighty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue. The penthouse’s master bedroom faced west. It overlooked most of Central Park and at night the twinkling lights of the West Side.

Older son Colin Durch immediately vowed to take care of his invalid and supremely wealthy mother, which he did with the perseverance and dedication of Florence Nightingale, less the altruistic motives of that beloved lady. Colin and his bespectacled dumb-as-shit wife, Donna, were not as intensely focused on Mother Durch as on the sickly woman’s will. With ne’er-do-well brother Arthur already excommunicated, Colin was sure he was now heir apparent and the odds-on favorite to receive Mother Durch’s vast fortune. The avaricious pair considered it just a matter of time, and a short amount of it at that, before they might become an extraordinarily wealthy couple.

They sold their own dilapidated, cockroach-infested apartment and moved into the luxurious duplex penthouse of Colin’s dying mother. Colin even sacrificed his run-down, quasi-bankrupt law practice so that he could spend more time looking after his failing mother’s affairs. Daughter-in-law Donna went along with the plan if not joyfully, then resolutely. The thought of being able to buy as many pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes as she wanted for the rest of her life gave her the needed resolve. She loved Louboutin’s red soles.

Meanwhile life continued on a downhill slant for Arthur Durch, even after his parole from the Petersburg Correctional Complex. The late nineties were a sad litany of terminated jobs and miscellaneous disappointments for the ex-con. Things didn’t seem to get better for Durch until that historic evening in 2006 when Arthur met his soul mate.

The event took place at Durch’s first Alcoholics Anonymous gathering in a Korean church on Sixty-second Street between Lexington and Third avenues in Manhattan. Arthur was never going to give up drinking. He went to the meeting to meet girls.