by Spencer Wise
“Listen,” I said, “sit down, will you? You want coffee? Let me make you some.”
“I’ll have yours.”
I set my coffee on a proper coaster just so he knew I understood the value of things. I asked if he was comfy, if he wanted a pillow for his back.
“Why do I have to sit?” he asked. “Nothing good comes from sitting. Only bad news. You’re going to put me in a home? Is that it? Or you’re marrying that Chinese farmer girl?”
“She’s not a farmer for the millionth time. Just listen please. Okay? I want to start a brand.”
His face pinched. “A brand?”
“Yes. A brand. That’s where the equity is. It’s my long-term plan, I guess you’d call it—for the factory. Let the brand drive the business.”
Dad sat forward in his chair and rubbed his hand over his cheek, thinking.
He knew the subtext of course: to be competitive with a brand, we couldn’t take a profit the first few years. But sometimes you needed to have two years of nothing to become Ralph Lauren—no, not just him, but to meld the two, Bernie and Zhang. To be both. The two could exist together. I could have it both ways and wouldn’t even have to change my name.
“Have you lost your damn mind?” he said, sticking his hand down into the toe box and flexing it back and forth. “It takes years for a brand to turn a profit. Do you know how much capital we’d need? How about logos, marketing, sales. You got a website?”
“Bernie’s at Blakes six years now, thanks to you. He knows sales. He’ll pull a team.”
“For free they work? I know you think you got this all figured out, but there’s a lot of shit. You got a trademark? Vendors? No, you got bubkes. Lawyers for regulations, taxes? For compliance. Something you know nothing about. Let’s start small. Did you get those new chinos hemmed like I asked? No. You can’t even do that. And they are great pants. So how can you start a brand? Huh?”
He was baiting me. The old infant gambit. Stale but still lethal.
I gulped. Told myself to stay calm.
“Dad,” I said. “I need your support. Got to have it.”
“You need my factory. I’m chopped liver in this deal.”
“I need you. Your ideas. Advice. No one hand-antiqued polyurethane until you. Who hand-antiques plastic? And then, I don’t know, you’re electrostatically flocking the shit out of polyurethane to look like nubuck—genius. I know that. So help me. Right now you’re thinking with your head. Forget your head for a second. What’s your gut say?”
“Go to lunch. Strangle son.”
“This is a way forward. New direction.”
Right now it was all economies of scale. Better was more and that’s why it was all shit. Cheap labor and mass market. But it didn’t have to be. You could slow down. Make quality.
“What’s our biggest asset?” I asked. “The factory. We control the manufacturing, right? That’s why a brand makes so much business sense. All I’m proposing is leveraging our experience and our factory.”
“We just lost Snow Lite,” he said. “A brand, if we were flush. If we were on a hot streak. But not now. Already tight on cash flow. The risk is too high. And just these few styles you’ve done.”
“Of course more styles,” I said. “This was just to give you an idea. A taste. You’re right it’s work, but I’m prepared to do it. I think it will hit. You got to learn to trust me. Look at me. Put that down.”
He leaned away from me and wouldn’t set the shoe down. Like a petulant child. Mine. Maybe it was a good sign if he didn’t want to part with it, but then again, he wasn’t looking at me.
“This is how you get big,” I said. “It’s entirely doable.”
I placed my hand on his shoulder, and he startled a little and looked up with this strained face.
“What’s going on here?” he said.
“What’s what?” I asked, but I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“We do casuals at my factory,” he said. “We do leather and polyurethane. That’s our niche. That’s what I do. What I’ve always done. My expertise. You want to change the factory?”
“I never said that.”
“You did worse. You made.” He shook his head like he was tossing off a bad dream, and he started to rise out of his chair slowly, his chest all puffed out. “Threw it right in my face. All this done behind my back. You and Bernie. The kid who pissed on my wedding photo. This is who you trust? I think the two of you are pissing on me.”
“Are you being funny?” I asked, less a question than a wish.
“No one’s laughing. We have a reputation. We have a look. We make a certain kind of a shoe and we make them private label.”
“We could make better. Am I wrong? Instead of playing up cheap shoes as more money, we could make better.”
He took a step toward me, and I tried not to lean back but my hips opened.
“My shoes are crap?” he asked. “I’m learning a lot today from you. A real education.”
“They’re not crap, I didn’t say crap,” I stammered.
“We fill a need not a want,” he said through a tight jaw. “Casuals for the masses. Mr. Heart Bleeds should appreciate this, but instead you want to change the factory’s image. Our customer base. Something that took me decades to build. And, look, when I came up, I wanted to start my own brand. Eons ago. Every nebbish wants the same thing. You aren’t the first. Got it? Nor are you the first guy to get a blow job from a Chinese farmer.”
“How did you get like this?” I asked. “So awful.”
“Because I tell the truth? Or because you don’t like it? Sorry, Pollyanna. You think I’m stupid, but I know you. She put these ideas in your head. How do you like that? What you think you want is what she wants. She’s playing you, you dip.”
“I think you’re jealous. That’s what I think.”
“Of you? Of her? The shoes? Don’t start. I’m going to say this once. I know you’re sensitive. This factory has a feel. Got it? A recognizable style. I run a respectable goddamn business. Don’t show me novelty footwear again.”
“These aren’t fucking moon boots,” I shouted. “They’re casuals.”
“How do I make it clear?” he said, slamming the shoe down on the desk to accentuate each word. “We do leather and polyurethane.”
“It’s a different direction,” I said, trying to push back. “We’re expanding. I thought you’d like that. You’re losing sight—” But he cut me off.
“This?” he said, rattling the shoe over his head like a saber. “This is woven elastic gore. For a comfort shoe? Leather or polyurethane—that’s my whole fucking business. In Tržicˇ, we made pearls. Full aniline. Calfskins cut to the spine. Tight as a fucking drum to the last. That’s what I brought here. Leather. The beautiful hand and grain. Pearls.”
“You don’t scare me yelling,” I said, but I didn’t believe that and he didn’t either.
“Tiger Step is my brand,” he shouted.
He picked up a measuring tape off the table and, pulling the tang out, poked me in the chest with it, saying, “Before me, the Chinese couldn’t draw a hand turkey much less make a decent shoe.”
“Uh-huh. The Messiah returns! Do you ever hear yourself?”
“Joke it up but it’s true. Not Yong, not anyone. I taught them. And you know what they call me?”
“Who can forget?”
“Tell me.” He poked me again in the chest. “I want to hear it.” The tape suddenly slurped back into its sheath. “Jack Hong. Merry Xian. Alena Fan. These are names in the business. They’ll tell you. Yong’ll tell you.”
Suddenly he reached across me, over my desk, and stamped his thumb down on the phone’s intercom button. His smell wafted over me and I was having a hard time thinking straight. What was his smell? Schmaltz and cordovan. Old Jew. It made me nauseous and at the same time I wan
ted to bury my head in his neck and sleep.
A staticky “Wei?” came over the intercom.
“Yong, what did Jack and Merry call me? Back in Taichung.”
Yong said, “The Emperor.”
“Thank you,” Dad said and slammed the button again.
“Got that? Emperor. Pick any department store in the States, and I had the window display. You understand? Not some shitty wall in the back, I got windows. My shoes. Snow fucking Lite.”
“It’s in the past, Pops,” I said, and that stopped him dead in his tracks.
His shoulders tensed.
“What the hell are you talking about, Alex?” he yelled. “The past? The past?”
“It means behind you. Face it, Dad. All of that’s history. You’re stuck back there. I mean, you even ride in the van backward. And you’re going to bury us if you don’t trust me to lead us forward.”
“Where do you get the nerve? You know how long it took me to build this factory? For you to piss it away—no, I can’t have it.”
“Look, it’s the same factory,” I said. “I’m not asking to devote the whole fucking factory to this thing. Just a line or two. Relax. The plant will still make money. Leather and polyurethane. Casuals. Our core business. All that stays. So I don’t know why you’re so upset.”
“Why I am upset?” he stammered. “I got a nayfish son, a business in the tank and I haven’t crapped in three days. Is that enough?”
“This is visionary, Dad,” I said, holding my hand out flat close to my chest, palm down, like that would somehow force my voice to stay calm and even.
“No,” he said. “This is death. We just lost a big program, we can’t afford to lose more. I won’t be pushed. Not by you. Not by—” And he started coughing and pointed at my water bottle on the desk. In a thin, hoarse voice, asking, “You mind?”
I handed him the bottle. He took a sip.
“Thank you,” he said, all polite and civilized, before going right back to yelling, “Forget it. Ain’t happening. No way, bubelah. Not on my watch. Do you even have vendors for this elastic gore?”
“Where do you think I got it? Of course. But I’m thinking we can make our own, here. More vertical integration, more hours for workers, more business—”
“You want to make this crap? Elastic? That’s even worse. Did I wrong you? Do you not love me? I know we’re in a slump, but you don’t just leap for the throat the minute someone’s weak. I mean, you do, you should, but not my throat. Them. Out there.”
He pointed to the window.
“Who the fuck is them?” I said. “We’re not against a them. Look, no one likes change. I wish everything could stay, but it can’t. It’s not uncommon when you get older—”
“Oh, blow it out your ass,” he said. “Not uncommon. You sound like a snob. Whose voice is that? You went to college. Am I supposed to be intimidated?”
“I need your blessing,” I said.
“Baruch atah, it won’t sell.”
“You don’t know that.”
“This is for a different factory. Here, I call the shots,” he said, taking one last step toward me so I could feel his belly against mine. His lip quivered. That big nose like an old crooked stovepipe, saying he was all soot and rust inside. A hardness to the man you didn’t fuck with. What could I do? It was a ruthless world. That’s why Dad was good. Because he was ruthless right back with it. Maybe I just didn’t have it.
I took a long step back away from him and leaned against the desk.
He glared at me for a second. “I win,” he rasped, stabbing his thumb on his sternum. “I always win.”
“Mazel tov,” I said.
Dad dragged himself over to the window behind my desk and leaned toward the glass, stretching his neck toward the upper-hinged sash of the window as I’d often seen him do in the hotel. Nose in the air. Trying to get fresh air.
I heard him sigh. “What did I do wrong,” he said under his breath, looking out over the dirty-gray city.
“Okay,” he said, spinning around to face me. “Let me see the fucking shoes again.”
I rushed over with the strongest style, the wedge, and waited silently with my hands behind my back.
“Lose these dimples,” he muttered, like he was talking to himself. “Crepe sole. Too much busy stuff. A little more extension, little more framing. Maybe cork sidewalls.”
“I like sandblasted,” I said.
He arched an eyebrow. “Your brain’s blasted.”
“This is my—” But my voice trailed off and I was thinking, Don’t push him away. He’s about to bite.
“It’s good,” he said. “You said you wanted my help?”
I nodded. He was quiet for a moment, thinking, and I tried reading his face, what was in his head. He was interested. No question.
“You told anyone else about this?” he asked.
“No.”
“Bernie told anyone?”
I shook my head.
“He’s got a big fucking mouth. You sure?”
“No. Yeah. Bernie didn’t say shit. Why would he?”
“I’m asking. So we don’t get ripped off. It happens when you run your mouth. I floated the Ecco shoes idea to Ben Kaplan in the schvitz once—then I blinked my fucking eyes and he was buying his father a hundred-twenty-foot yacht and house on the Cape. It happens.”
Now was the time to speak up. Say to him: To really give this brand a chance, you know we got to do it no-profit for a time. I know you like private label. It’s safe and easy. But this is a different thing. My thing. When you passed the plant to me, when I signed with my clothes stinking of the river we poison, eating all the Chinese food you don’t understand, when I signed my name—this was why. I was signing my name to this perfect fucking shoe.
I felt these words gathering in me. Ready to speak. Spit it out now. As soon as I opened my mouth to speak, Dad cut me off.
“Good design,” he said, “But this is no brand, you know that.”
My legs went rubbery. Until the very last second he waited.
“We can’t take profits for maybe two years—you know that’s impossible. Tell you what, I’m going to take this thing and make money on it the way I know how, my normal lines of distribution, but listen to me, I want to tell you how proud I am.”
“You mean private label,” I said, a numbness running over my skin. “Not branded.”
“Of course. It’s the smart option. Abelson’s puts up the line of credit. They pay freight and first cost. They’re the importer of record. It’s their ass on the line. Not ours. We have security. Your way, if the whole thing flops, we eat it.”
“I understand that,” I said, gritting my teeth. But we were giving away our designs. Everything we made was owned by someone else.
“Okay, well, it sounds like you don’t understand. I can only go off how you sound. And you sound confused.”
“I’m not confused.”
“Then what are you?” he asked, scrunching up his face.
“I don’t know. Everything’s fuzzy.”
“Well, unfuzz. Listen, Alex, you’re getting bent out of shape over nothing. This isn’t personal. It’s business. You’ve done a beautiful job, now leave it to me. Okay? We’re going to make your line. That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s what you wanted, right?”
“Sure,” I said. I was just staring straight ahead. No. That wasn’t what I wanted. It was taking a lot of energy to stand there.
“Alex,” he said, smiling. “This I like.” He pointed to the first shoe lined up on the table. “Reminds me of a Stuart Weitzman. Nice lines here at the low point, and this one, you got textures, good detailing. I’m very content.”
“You like them?” I asked, but as soon as it was out of my mouth I wished I could take it back. Groveling again. Just what he wanted.
&nb
sp; “You kidding? You did great. I don’t think I’ve said that enough. Couldn’t be more proud of you.” His chin lowered. Looking at me over the top of his glasses. “Hey, I’d say that even if you weren’t my son. That you’re my son makes it all the better. You’re way ahead of where I was at your age.”
I felt myself straightening up. It felt good to hear even if I didn’t want it to. It really did.
“You’re not bullshitting?” Someone would probably say if you had to ask, you already knew the answer. So what? I knew he’d cut my balls off the minute I tried to grow some, anticipating the very moment and snip—I got that, but this other thing felt real good. A little pat on the head. For once. How long had you been after it? How far? All your frantic dog-paddling halfway around the world just to hear your father say you weren’t a turd. To pry one fucking ruby of kindness out of his throat. That was all I really wanted, right? So we were equals now, he said as much, and there was nothing to feel ashamed about anymore.
“What I think doesn’t matter anyhow,” he said. “Forget a hundred-twenty-foot yachts—this is the dream. Family business.” He rubbed my shoulder, a big smile on his face. “So we got a deal?”
“Okay,” I said, backing down.
Maybe to an outsider I sounded chickenshit, but it was honestly stupid to try to get everything in one shot. Let him get attached to the design first. Then I could chip away at him. Make him see it was the perfect stand-alone brand. A shoe-dog adjusted on the fly, midpitch, and that was all I was doing. Adjusting my plan. I hadn’t given up, hell no; I was taking the long way around.
When learning to become an old shoe-dog, these were the things you did. All of us, we were charred inside from the same fire—I don’t know from where—maybe some Podunk shtetl pine-fire, maybe a place much darker. But it was the same. You couldn’t scour it out of us.
Dad was gushing now. “The sandal, the Mary Jane, peep-toe wedge—beautiful stuff. You were playing music last night, boy. All different notes. But I want you to be proud. Don’t do shit for me. Will you remember?”