From Lemons to Lemonade Then Back to Lemons Again for Johnny, Donnie and Lonnie LeDous

“If you think no one cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.” Former teen pop singing sensation, Lebanese Lenny Huckabone
Driving my daughter Dali on a short errand to pick up the milk I was supposed to pick up earlier that day, we passed three young living embodiments of that uncrushable and unquenchable Canadian entrepreneurial spirit - the LeDous triplets - Johnny, Lonnie and Donnie, sons of Ronnie and Tawny, sitting behind a makeshift lemonade stand. The boys resembled characters ripped from the jaundiced pages of a musty, dusty Twain novel. The lemonade stand was a simple affair to be sure - a small rickety pressboard coffee table. On it was a large translucent Tupperware jug full of delicious lemonade with ice cubes bobbing around and clicking off one another, and a pile of stacked foam cups.

“Hey, cool, a lemonade stand. It’s the LeDous triplets. Ah, that’s cute. Should we stop, dad?” Dali asked.

“Yeah, sure. On the way back - there’s some change in the glove compartment.”

I buy locally whenever I can from people I know. I buy stuff like corn, pork from door-to-door pork producers, pickerel, homemade penicillin, and whole cows that are not fattened up on genetically modified super cow-corn. My grandfather was a working farmer, so for many years I was literally up to my eyeballs playing around in cow shit and in a barn full of a million hidden dangers, and from my experiences on my grandfather’s farm, I know that cows don’t eat corn. At least, they didn’t back then. My grandfather’s cows were herbivores and proud of it. They ate grass, oats, hay, barley and four leaf clovers in open pastures - each cow had their own personal space to think cow thoughts and dream cow dreams. Today, cows eat corn and don’t get any quality roaming time in pastures. If they are having private cow thoughts and dreams, it is probably scheming up a way to kill off the owners of factory farms. Crowded, they just stand still and eat some type of corn mash. Then they get sick, depressed and lazy and then we eat the cow and get super sick and so forth. Same with chickens that are force fed pure milk chocolate and Kellogg’s Blueberry Pop Tarts. We keep screwing with the food chain. Don’t get me going on emus.

Sure to my word - for a man is nothing if not for his word - on the return trip we pulled into the crushed gravel driveway of the LeDous homestead, which is essentially a split story bricked bungalow with a small front lawn. But something was horribly wrong. Things did not seem as quaint as when we had driven past a little earlier. The small rickety coffee table was tipped over and now fully engulfed in flames, and the Tupperware container that only minutes before was topped up with that light yellow refreshing beverage was lying in the grass - its contents long spilled into the earth. The three LeDous boys were crying hysterically. The cardboard sign advertising the business was torn, tattered, battered, ripped, soggy, bent and was now lying face up the grass.

“My God! What’s happened here?” I asked, holding a fistful of coins of various values.

“We’ve gone bankrupt,” said Lonnie from under his bowl shaped hair cut. “We’ve lost everything. Our house, our family’s savings, our college funds. Everything! So, we’ve set fire to the stand for the insurance.”

“Well, Lonnie. I’m not much of a business man but I sure do love arson, but I’m thinking that if you intentionally burn your business for the insurance, you shouldn’t tell people. But that’s beside the point. Anyhoo, how could this have happened? We only drove by less than ten minutes ago.”

“Yes,” said Donnie. “Our business started off really good. Really strong. The profit margins were healthy, business was brisk and we were looking at actually hiring more staff through a staffing agency. Everything was happening so fast and according to the plan that the Small Business Centre helped us create. We had some strong silent partners and we were even thinking of selling cigarettes, rifles and popcorn to add some variety for our customers. But, that was this morning. Nothing seemed impossible this morning. Then everything changed. Some guy in a weird suit drove up in a big black truck and showed us some kind of badge. He said he was from the government and asked to see our operating licence. We didn’t think we needed one, but we did, so he shut us down on the spot. We even offered him some free lemonade, but this really sent him over the edge. He kicked over the table and when Johnny tried to stop him, he made fun of Johnny’s limp. And then, to make things worse, while the government guy was here, one girl that bought lemonade about half an hour ago came back crying. She complained that her lemonade had given her violent cramps, and nightmarish hallucinations, so we had to give her her money back. Her dad’s a real estate lawyer so we had to make sure she left satisfied. Fifteen minutes ago, we just found out that the lemonade we had imported from China by way of Lebanon and Swisha was in fact heavily cut with lead and strychnine so we figured that after we used up our stockpiled supply, we would buy our powdered lemonade locally from Walmart. That way we could be sure of high quality and favourable working conditions for the lemonade people. But it’s all too late now. The dream is over.”

To be honest, the meteoric rise and tragic fall of the LeDous Triplets Lemonade Empire depressed the hell out of me. We should have just kept driving. I felt terrible as a moving van backed up to the LeDous household and six guys wearing heavy elastic girdles began emptying the contents of the family home into the back of the truck.

Johnny wept. “All that hard work for nothing. We lost close to nine hundred thousand dollars in this business.”

I was a little surprised. “How long have you been selling lemonade again?”

“We just opened for business this morning. We posted really strong sales from 9 to 11 am when the sun was out. Then it got cloudy and people just stopped coming. The dream is over for me and my whole family,” he said. “I’ve seen everything just slip through my fingers, kind of like Greece.”

“The musical?”

“No. The country,” he said before breaking out into an uncontrollable crying jag.

It broke my heart. I tried to offer up something inspiring, but all I could think of was: “That sucks huge, kid.”

Dali and I drove off - both watching in the rear view mirror as the fire department made short work of the burning table. It’s tough to make an honest living. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Gandhi said this to me once. We were in a supermarket and he was stealing ham. That scene left me rattled, dazed and more than a little confused.

I’m reading ‘Mr. Nice - An Autobiography’ by Howard Marks. Published in 1996, the cover states: He was Britain’s most wanted man. He has spent seven years in America’s toughest penitentiary. You’ll like him.”

Here’s the back blurb (reprinted with no permission)

“During the mid 1980s, Howard Marks had forty-three aliases, eighty-nine phone lines, and twenty five companies trading throughout the world. Bars, recording studios, offshore banks: all were money-laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing.

Marks began to deal during a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford and was soon moving large quantities of hashish into Europe and America in the equipment of touring rock bands. The academic life began to lose its allure. At the height of his career, he was smuggling consignments of up to thirty tons from Pakistan and Thailand to America and Canada and had contact with organisations as diverse as the CIA, MI6, the IRA, and the Mafia.

After many years and a world-wide operation by the Drug Enforcement Agency, he was busted and sentenced to twenty five years in prison at the United States Federal Penitentiary, Terre Haute, Indiana, the site of America's only Federal Death Row. He was released on parole in April 1995 after serving seven years of his sentence.”

Today, there is a happy ending for the LeDous triplets. All three boys are active hash-smugglers and genetic super-corn fed beef dealers working out of the basement of the local Dollar Store. That Canadian entrepreneurial spirit lives on. Screw you, Dragons!