I sit in International Marketing 516, allowing the professor's lecture on business opportunities in South America to pass through my head unobstructed. Staring out the classroom bay window, I watch water-painted tangerine clouds lie delicately above the pencil-sketched outline of the Hollywood hills.

But the real distraction is this exotic Middle Eastern woman assigned to the seat next to mine. Ebony hair, in tight wavy curls. Smooth, dark-skinned shoulders. Flawless, impossibly long legs. While the professor drones on about the barriers to entry in the Sao Paolo market, my thoughts begin to drift. . .

I am nestled in her arms like a coddled baby. Words lose their meaning as slight facial responses and glancing touches speak volumes. She outlines my face with a paralyzing caress, sketching my features as if I were the canvas, and she the artist.

She unbuttons her blouse and presses against me, her heartbeat throbs along my forehead. Like a feather floating earthbound, she lowers herself. Our lips join and--

"Mr. Martino!" The professor's gruff voice reverberates through my head. "Can you enlighten the class on what Brazil's import tariffs are for durable goods?"

Huh!?!

He steps up to where I'm sitting, then looms over me. "Brazil. . . Tariffs. . . Durable goods. . ."

"Uh. . ."

"Another articulate answer from Mr. Martino," he says, shaking his head. "Perhaps you'll join us in today's lecture?"

A wave of chuckles rolls across the room, passing over me just as I shrink into the cushion of my seat. Even she is laughing.

God, I love this class.

Alfred C. Martino, Copyright 2013

I found the passage below in a diary entry I had made in December of 1994--the night before a meeting with a successful businessman from the Los Angeles area, who had offered to be a kind of mentor. My business partner and I were a year and a half out of graduate school. It was a difficult, awkward time. We had founded our first company, South Bay Entertainment (which would, years later, evolve into Listen & Live Audio), in the second year of our MBA program at USC's Marshall School of Business, but its growth was slow going, to say the least--we had only one published product--and the persistent doubts were often overwhelming. 

It's 2:28 am, the morning of another meeting which may or may not reveal anything new about our company's situation. In fact, it will probably not, but instead be a kind of  'pep talk' for us. And in three hours I will wake up, or simply get up from this chair awake, and take a shower, dress and drive an hour or so. I will be exhausted then, but for now I am unusually lucid, not anxiety-ridden or caffeine-alert, but simply awake.

I don't know what lessons are to be learned from reading this passage, now nineteen years after I wrote it, except that, perhaps, this sort of angst is what most, if not all, entrepreneurs go through early on in their ventures. And the emotions may not be that much different from the person who decides they are going to be a writer and spends the first few years learning the craft, trying to find their voice, and believing, rightly or wrongly, that no matter how many words they type into their computer, they will not consider themselves a writer until they have something published. Maybe it's this doubt and fear that pushes the entrepreneur and the writer never to quit.

I don't know. I just found it interesting.