“Look,” I told him, “this isn’t art, it’s business. And I’ll pay you ten bucks for each sheet you write. Five planets times twelve signs. That’s six hundred dollars for two days’ work. What do you say?”

“Well,” Bob replied, “I guess it really is personalized, and frankly I never really thought the computer got it right anyway. I’ll do it.”

I had one more idea. I did a little research and determined that all the other horoscope companies advertising in the National Enquirer and Star were charging $10 to $20 plus $1 for postage and handling. If I was only charging a buck, why not advertise the product as a free horoscope to introduce people to our product? The buck would just be the postage and handling charge. I mean, if you could believe in horoscopes to begin with, why not believe they were free? That ought to boost sales, I thought.

It did. Soon, it seemed like half the students at Bronx High School of Science were spending half their school days poring through ephemerides and addressing envelopes while their unsuspecting teachers turned their backs and wrote physics equations on the blackboard.

Nights were even wilder. As the orders from tabloid ads piled in, we started pulling all-nighters at the Empire State Building to keep up with the volume. We ran ads in the Globe, Star, and National Enquirer. Tabloids today may be utterly discredited, but to us that’s where the money was. Soon we overflowed our closet, and the fifty-first floor of this prestigious skyscraper began to resemble a long, unending frat party. We played jazz with the night janitor, ate in the twenty-four-hour Belmore Cafeteria, and drank seltzer with the cabbies at three in the morning, and then went back to pack more horoscopes. Craziest of all, the customers loved it and referrals started coming in from what seemed like an endless supply of lunatics who couldn’t wait to send their dollar bills to me.

Just handling the money, in fact, became a major problem. My thirteen-year-old sister complained that the stress from stamping so many checks for deposit was ruining her cheerleading abilities. I got self-inking stamps. Then, as the volume grew, my mother refused to open envelopes. I bought a machine to slice them open. Soon, the bank started to complain that they were losing money handling so many one- and two-dollar checks and the branch was overwhelmed and wouldn’t accept anymore. Only a threat to go to the press with the story of how Citibank was putting a high school boy out of business caused the higher-ups to relent and instruct the branch to keep accepting my deposits of little checks.