There was a phone call David Thiermann almost didn’t take.
It was 1972. He was renting a room in Santa Cruz. He had just dropped out of a master’s program at UC Berkeley, walked away after calling out a professor for reading his own textbook aloud to a roomful of sleeping graduate students, and the pride that had gotten him through Tanzania, through Brazil, through a machine gun raid in Rio and a televised thumb piano performance and a year collecting instruments across every country in South America except Venezuela had landed him here: depressed, broke, and convinced he was a failure.
He had been student body president at UC Santa Cruz. He had run a leprosy hospital at 19. He had won first place on Brazilian television.
None of that helped when the phone rang.
The caller was a man named Tom. Tom had recently made the mistake of building a sauna inside a closet using a wood-burning stove, which was how he burned his rented house down. All he had left was an old Ford pickup truck and a pair of boots. His father, who worked for the fire department in Southern California, had given him enough money to haul two tons of oranges up from the south and try to sell them at the flea market for a small profit.
Tom was losing that bet. The oranges were rotting. He needed help.
David hung up on him.
He was a former student body president. His professors at UC Santa Cruz might see him. He had an image to protect.
He sat there. He thought about it. He picked the phone back up.
“You know what? I just thought: you don’t have a plan. You better start doing something — it doesn’t matter what it is. And who gives a hoot what people think?”
He went to the flea market. They got rid of two tons by the five-pound sack. Then they bought four tons. Then eight. They knocked on every door in Santa Cruz County, one side of the street each, handing out samples, selling by the forty-pound box, buying for ten dollars and selling for twenty.
The former ambassador of Tanzania and Brazil was going door to door, doubling his money on citrus.
He became known in Santa Cruz as the Orange Man.
The $50 garage
When eight tons of oranges require somewhere to live, you find a garage.
They found one on a downtown Santa Cruz street for fifty dollars a month. The previous tenant was a German mechanic who had developed a drinking problem and gone out of business — he’d been repairing Volkswagens in there, and the floor was thick with grease and old transmissions. David and Tom poured muriatic acid over everything, hauled the transmissions to the dump, built sliding doors across the open front, and moved the produce in.
At night, after selling all day, they’d go back to the garage to hang out with friends. There was a blender. Then smoothies. Then a beer and wine license. Then thirty employees. Then an open stage — no auditions, no gatekeeping — running from ten in the morning until midnight, seven days a week.
In four years, the $50 garage became the Good Fruit Company.
David was the MC and the bartender. He never auditioned anyone. The stage held strip tease, belly dancing, juggling, fire eating, sword swallowing, lectures on every subject, every kind of music. If you could perform, you were welcome.
He loved it. He also ran it for four years without a single vacation, working fifteen-hour days every day of the week.
“I got to the point where I just didn’t have any more love to give to people.”
He sold it. The buyers renamed it Tropical Barbecue and started selling barbecued rabbit. Santa Cruz was not ready for that, and they went under.
The nose flute and the identical instruments
When the Good Fruit Company was someone else’s problem, a friend offered David a trip to Tahiti. He went.
He was there for six weeks, studying French Polynesian musical instruments, comparing them against the ones he’d found in the Amazon while working in Brazil. What he discovered surprised him: they were identical. The same instruments, on opposite sides of the world, having arrived there by routes no one could fully trace.
A retired French Polynesian chieftain named Tai Mai Tutu taught him to play the nose flute. It looks like a bamboo flute you’d normally play with your mouth — except you hold it to your nostril and blow air through that instead. You get a tune out of it. David can still play it.
This is consistent with a pattern you can track across his whole life: David tends to find, in places that seem entirely different from each other, the same deep thing. The leprosarium in Tanzania and the flea market in Santa Cruz. The Amazon instruments and the Tahitian ones. The career counselor’s question and the mjanja’s invitation into fiction. He keeps arriving at the same discovery from different directions: the human equipment is the same everywhere. The specific story differs. The underlying need does not.
Door to door, the second time
David came back from Tahiti and needed money. He went back to selling oranges — this time, only to offices.
He worked every office building in Santa Cruz County, from Boulder Creek to Aptos. He’d walk in with a forty-pound box and a question: what are you guys really doing in here? And if you’re successful, why are you successful?
Because he was the Orange Man (familiar, local, useful) people gave him tours. They told him their business secrets. He got to know the internal logic of every enterprise in the county by delivering citrus.
One of his customers, a woman who sold ceramics, noticed he was burning out. She offered him a trade: a session with a career counselor she had scheduled and wasn’t going to use. David thought: why not.
He met the counselor in a coffee shop. For an hour, the man listened while David talked about his life and career. The counselor took notes. He fed them back.
David walked out into the Santa Cruz afternoon and thought: that was kind of fun. Maybe I’ll just do that.
That was 1987. He has not stopped.
$35 an hour and what happened next
He started the same way he started everything: with no credentials and a willingness to figure it out in the room.
He met clients in coffee shops. He listened. He wrote down the story of their whole life and read it back to them. They found this therapeutic. He found it interesting. He charged nothing until his savings ran out at which point he told his next client the rate was $35 an hour, mostly because he couldn’t believe anyone would pay.
They said: sure, where do I send the check?
After about a year, he raised it to $55 because he was booked full. Then a clinical psychologist called who was, by David’s description, something of a bully on the phone. He told her the rate was $110 an hour, hoping she’d say no.
She showed up and paid it.
That became the rate.
What the Orange Man years were actually about
I thought about David’s story this week alongside something I’ve been sitting with from our conversation — the way he described coming back to Santa Cruz in 1972, depressed, renting a room, feeling like a failure for leaving grad school.
Here’s what he had already done by then: He had lived inside a leprosy hospital for three years and turned it into a functioning business. He had survived a political raid at gunpoint in Rio. He had won a national television competition in Brazil. He had traveled every country in South America collecting instruments. He had studied Haitian Vodou ceremonies and organized a public health dispensary in Haiti. He had completed a Ministry of Health television series.
He was 26 years old. He felt like a failure because he couldn’t sit through a professor reading from his own textbook.
Most of us carry some version of this. The record of experience we discount because it doesn’t match the credential we expected to hold by now. The life that happened while we were making other plans, and that we’re not sure counts.
The Orange Man years are the chapter where David stopped auditing his own life against someone else’s rubric and started doing the next thing in front of him. The flea market. The garage. The open stage. Tahiti. The office buildings. A coffee shop and a man who listened.
All of it led somewhere. None of it looked, in the moment, like it was supposed to.
Where we go next
Two stories are still waiting.
The first: what happened when David Thiermann listed himself in the Yellow Pages under Spiritual Consultants — and how he ended up with a license to practice metaphysics in the city of Santa Cruz.
The second is older and quieter. It goes back to Tanzania, to a woman David met there — a nurse who had studied in Ireland and came home speaking Swahili with an Irish accent. He has been circling that story for weeks.
We’re going in.
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David Thiermann, 80, lives in Santa Cruz, California. He has worked in a leprosarium, run a restaurant, crossed the county selling fruit, studied instruments on four continents, and spent 40 years helping people figure out what to do with their lives. He is, by his own account, an improviser.
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is a Marine Corps veteran of twenty-three years and co-founder of Betweenward, a space for people building what comes next when the old method has stopped working. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, where he writes on institutional accountability and public memory. He holds a doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from USC Rossier, teaches at UC Irvine’s Division of Continuing Education, and is the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).