“Well, unfortunately, I was steered very wrong with my investments. My family made off of my investments, but I didn’t, so I sleep in my car. I was in a very bad car accident, and I got a $185,000 from the insurance company. And gold had just come back into the market at $110 an ounce. And I wanted to buy gold. My mother was like, ‘You’ll lose all your money. You got $300 in that, you’ll lose all your money.’ What has man throughout history fought, killed, robbed, maimed, destroyed civilizations for? What did God tell Moses to tell his people when they left Egypt? ‘Take all the gold.’ Ah, ‘You’ll lose all your money. You’ll lose all your money. Go invest with your sister. She’ll invest in annuities.’ And I’m finding out that annuities is the worst thing that anybody can invest your money in. So I don’t really have much of a life. I live in my car. And I have a portable DVD player. And I watch movies at night. And that’s it.
Well, I love to cook. I’m a chef. You might not remember the old Astor Hotel in New York. Well, it’s not there anymore. It was in Times Square. It was a very elite hotel. John Jacob Astor, who lost his life on the Titanic, he was a fur magnate, and that’s where he made all his money. And he built this unbelievable hotel in New York. My dad was the manager of the restaurant. And that’s how I got my start. I started scrubbing pots and pans, and I worked my way up. And that’s what I do. I’m a pretty good cook, too. My specialties are all Mediterranean foods from all around the Mediterranean. Oriental cooking. I can cook a hamburger. I can make some really good meatloaf and things like that. I can’t do it now because of my vision. And my leg – I can’t stand very long. But I do what I can.
Like I said, I wish I could find a place, you know. A small place, just give me a room, so that I could stretch out. And I don’t have to sit at Starbucks all day and charge my DVD player. I could just plug it in, and go out and do things. I love to do things, you know. I come up here because the work ethic in me, that I’ve developed when I was young in my family – I go nuts if I don’t do anything. So I come up here for volunteer work.
I had a skull fracture, and my eye muscle got caught in the skull fracture, and it healed that way. So I see double now. I went to USC. And the head of the ophthalmology department wanted to take my case because he thought it was interesting. And it was: they put prisms, and drops, and exercises, and everything. And it didn’t work. And they said, ‘Well, we could put two procedures in your eyes. The thing is, at the end of the second procedure, you might not be able to see.’ I go, ‘Well, gee. Let me think about that for a minute … No, I’d rather see double.’
Also in the accident that I had, my thigh bone was crushed. And they put me in a traction, and they pulled the bone back together pretty much. And I have this intense pain all the time. And nothing I can do about it. Doctor said that’s it – it’s going to get worse all the time. [It was] in 1977. Quite a while ago. I was a passenger in the car. And the guy who was driving was doing preludes – it’s a downer – and I didn’t know it. And he – we were taking an exit turn. The exit turn was at 25 miles an hour. He went up the curb to hit a tree. I tried to climb out the window – didn’t quite make it. The police said he was doing an excess of 80 miles an hour on this 25 mile an hour turn. Anyway, I was in a hospital. I was comatose for two and half months with a broken, crushed thigh, fractured skull. What happened to me when my family came to the hospital, and the doctor said, ‘Well, he’s not dead yet.’ That’s how bad it was.”
Excerpt may be edited for clarity.