by Mel Ziegler
I hung up and called the police. Nothing out of place, I told them, no signs of a break-in, only the day’s receipts were missing, with a lot of cash sales. The police agreed that yes, she probably did it, but with only circumstantial evidence, there was nothing they could do.
“Here’s the thing,” said the officer. “You’ll probably never see that cash again, but you could confront her and threaten to turn her in unless she gives you back the checks and credit card receipts.” (Credit transactions were still years away from being transmitted electronically.) “But don’t get your hopes up. If she’s a pro, she won’t fall for it.”
I called Annette again, this time apologizing for bothering her when she wasn’t feeling well, but said I needed to unload some heavy boxes from the van and could use her help because Mel was out of town. I offered to drive to her house and pick her up and then take her back home afterward and even bring her some soup from the market. She agreed hesitantly but said she could drive herself to the store. I met her in the parking lot and signaled for her to come into the back of the van with me. As soon as she did, I slammed the sliding door shut, locking us both inside.
Her face showed sheer terror.
“All right, I know you took the money, and the police know you took the money. There are fingerprints all over the place,” I threatened in a tone so menacing I even scared myself. “All the police need me to do is press charges, and you’re in jail.”
She froze, confirming my hunch. The one-tenth of 1 percent of me that worried I might be wrong was relieved. I watched her mouth fall open, wordless.
“You should be locked up for this, but, frankly, I am so disappointed in you, I just want you out of my life.”
She exhaled, eyes pleading.
I stared hard at her, then said, “What did you do with the checks and the credit card slips? If I get them back, maybe I’ll consider not pressing charges.”
“I threw them in the Dumpster over there,” she blurted, bursting into tears. “It was my boyfriend who made me do it. Please, no police.”
“Go get them! Now!” I demanded, opening the van door. She jumped out. I followed right behind as she headed to the Dumpster. She stuck her hand in it and rummaged around the top layer of garbage until she found the box and handed it to me, shaking. I checked it. No cash, but the credit card slips and checks were still there. When I looked up, she was already hurrying to her car.
You would have thought we were the Bank of America. Disguised felons kept coming to rob us. The friendly man in his thirties, well dressed in slacks, button-down shirt, and loafers. Telling stories of polo matches, trying on a couple of leather jackets, more polo stories, thinking about this jacket or maybe that one, and then coming back on a Saturday afternoon when the banks were closed and writing a check for $850. When the check bounced, Patricia headed straight to the address on the check with a burly officer from the Mill Valley Police Department.
The officer had told her that he could not legally enter the man’s apartment without a search warrant. But that did not deter Patricia. She persuaded the officer to come with her only for protection. He would wait outside; she would enter the apartment and get the merchandise back. The officer drove her to the man’s apartment in a squad car, and accompanied her to the door. As it turned out, it was his boot stepping over the transom that prevented the thief from shutting the door in Patricia’s face. She got the leather jackets back.
I never met the pros who flung a brick through the plate glass window in the middle of the night. They went for the leather jackets as well. On this occasion, I learned there were several pages advertising “24-hour Plate Glass Window Repair” services in the Yellow Pages. Welcome to retailing.
Ultimately, these incidents were bumps on the on-ramp, but they didn’t feel like bumps at the time. They felt like crashes.
11
Details, Details
A few bruises, a little beat up, but on we went. The days began to blur, yet somehow we rented a desperately needed warehouse and hired a few clerks to handle the phones, type up the orders, and pick, pack, and ship them out.
The warehouse was a few miles away in Sausalito, near houseboats on the waterfront. Having honed my skills on stingy surplus dealers, I negotiated a great deal on a lease. Or so I thought.
“Remember now, this is the waterfront,” the landlord said as we each signed. “Sometimes the tides get a little high.”
That bit of deft circumlocution, I would soon learn, was meant to inform me that the warehouse would flood if it rained at high tide on full moons. So much for reasonable rent. A few weeks later, it rained on a full moon. The waters of San Francisco Bay swooshed in during high tide and covered the floor two feet deep. We figured we’d just go home and come back when the tide receded, but our cars were submerged as well. Fortunately, our eclectic inventory included surplus wader boots. We promptly donned them and passed them out to the employees. This became our ritual practice, allowing us to pack and ship mail orders without interruption during the hours of high tide whenever it rained on a full moon.
The warehouse flooding, easily navigated with our wader boots, turned out to be a relatively minor problem when measured against a more daunting predicament. We were building a market for a type of product that could not be reliably replenished. Jumping into the business, we had no choice but to buy whatever we could as cheaply as we could. The prospect that there would be nothing left to sell was not something we had the luxury of worrying about. But now it was a real problem. If we were as successful as we hoped, we could exhaust the world’s vintage military surplus, most of which had been produced in the Second World War. It was the congenital flaw in our business concept.
The only solution, if it could even work, would be to produce our own line of clothing inspired by the best surplus. Under this scenario, we would feather in our own designs and sell them right along with the surplus as the surplus phased out. Any other path would guarantee extinction.
Of course, designing our own line and having it manufactured would take money—more money than we had. Not to mention how two inexperienced people already stretched in every direction were going to get it done. We were already using whatever remaining mental and physical energy we had to keep our business going from one day to the next, let alone next month or next year. Not only did we have a store to manage and run, but it was a store where all the merchandise had to be discovered, remade, or fussed with in some unusual way. And on top of that, we needed to feed a catalogue that had to be planned, produced, updated, analyzed, and fulfilled—mostly by us. We had unwittingly plunged into three businesses at once, each of which itself would have been a handful—a store business, a catalogue business, and a remanufacturing business—and all of it without money to back us up. Had we been a bit less impetuous at the outset, a little more planning might have simplified things. We didn’t yet have so much as a system for tracking the value—or quantity—of our inventory. An item was either on the shelf to pick and pack, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, it could have been (a) sold, (b) shoplifted, or (c) pinched by an employee. We’d find out later. For now, we grabbed and hired all able persons who came through the door looking for a job, and fed them into a company whose systems and organization were challenged. While it helped to have a small pool of cash from store and catalogue sales keeping us afloat, the boat was leakier than ever, and we were in no less danger of capsizing.
I kept running notes on my bedside table of everything keeping me awake at night:
Problem 1. We need more merchandise and variety than the surplus dealers can offer, especially for women.
2. There is not enough time to remake surplus.
3. Our unusual merchandise takes work to sell, and the prices are so low that selling $500 worth is exhausting.
4. No matter how many new things we get, it is impossible to make the store look fresh and exciting because everything is always the same drab khaki or olive drab color.
5. Our washer and dry
er are wearing out.
6. So are we.
In coming up with solutions, I worked backward as usual.
6. Wasn’t going to be solved until the other problems were, so . . .
5. Easy! The Laundromat was next door.
4. This one troubled me most. Our whole business was based on khaki, and even I was getting sick of wearing it every single day. But as long as we relied on surplus, that’s what we were going to get: shades of khaki, olive drab, and maybe a touch of navy and occasional white. Pucci we were not.
How we solved this problem was why our partnership worked. What one of us just couldn’t deal with, the other took on.
On the afternoon of a rather stressful morning, Mel called me at the store from a pay phone on a noisy, windy corner in San Francisco.
“I know what you need to do!” he screamed into the receiver over the howling wind.
“What?”
“Diet!”
“Whaaaat?!!” I screeched back. Oh my God! Is he actually telling me that I’m getting fat?
“Di! It!” he yelled again.
“You’re kidding, right? I don’t even have time to eat anymore!” I tried to keep my voice down as a customer turned to stare. I was growing furious.
“No, no, no!” he laughed. “I mean dye the surplus. Where is it written it has to be khaki? Get some color into the store!”
Breakthrough! Natural fabrics would dye beautifully, and with khaki as the base, the boldest colors would take on the richness of a tinted photograph. We could dye wartime thermal underwear tops, khaki shirts, white cotton shirts, wool aviator scarves that had yellowed with age, and what I suspected would be the biggest hit of all: some funky World War II overalls we nabbed from Zimm for a song.
Yes! I thought. I’ll dye everything I can. Then we’ll deal with problems one, two, and three.
12
Jeito!
After dropping a new catalogue in the mail, and while waiting for it to hit (it took a few weeks when mailed economically at bulk rates), we decided to seize the lull for a vacation that we had been dreaming about ever since we met. We left our newly hired crew in charge, trusting they’d figure out what to do, and took off for . . . Rio!
Imagine a world without cell phones, e-mail, and Internet, in which international communications were expensive and often unreliable. And here we were leaving behind our business and flying down to Rio de Janeiro as insouciantly as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
To be free to do as we wished and to travel—that’s why we had started this company, right?
Rio represented the ultimate fantasy of freedom to us: the freedom of living spontaneously in the day. It was hot, it was exotic, it was sexy, and it was cheap. After months of nonstop 24/7 days in our own Banana Republic, we wanted to play in someone else’s. Brazil was the perfect ticket. We handed the keys to the employees and jauntily sambaed off. Our plan was to stay three weeks until the catalogue hit. We decided to rent an apartment in Ipanema.
As we walked into the first real estate office we found, a dark, lanky man in a white short-sleeved shirt got up to greet us and signaled for coffees. Three demitasse cups filled with dark coffee and melting sugar cubes arrived in seconds. Two swigs, and we rocketed off with the man to look at an Ipanema penthouse a bit more frayed than we would have liked. But it was in a great location and the right price. We took it.
We threw down our bags, changed into our swimsuits, and headed immediately for the beach. There we saw miles of beautiful bronze girls in tangas and guys in mini Speedos covering almost every inch of white sand except where fierce games of beach volleyball were in progress.
We found a place to wedge in and threw down our mat on the warm sand. Our bodies, frozen with more tension than we had realized, began to thaw in the Brazilian sun. What a great idea to come here, we agreed and kissed. I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see a man in shorts babbling something in Portuguese. Having studied my Berlitz phrase book on the plane, I shrugged and said, “Não falo Portugese.” He rattled on, frustrated. “Não falo Portugese,” I repeated. He could have cared less, as I was about to learn. I reached for my bag to get my sunglasses. The bag wasn’t there. Looking up in sudden terror, I saw it on the arm of another man rushing away on the beach. I jumped up and chased him, yelling, but the man disappeared into the crowd.
Gone: passports, return tickets, credit cards, traveler’s checks, and the rest of our cash. No! Suddenly we had nothing, no ID, no way back home. Nothing but a few cruzeiros left in my pocket and a key to the Ipanema penthouse we had just rented. I looked around at the unconcerned crowd.
We found our way to the nearest police station, and with the help of much gesturing and one policeman who understood some Spanish, we explained what had happened. They shook their heads, suppressing smiles.
“Is there any chance we’ll get our bag back?” Mel asked.
The one who spoke un poco de español repeated the question in Portuguese to the others.
They all laughed.
Then they pantomimed what had happened. We nodded, and they laughed again.
The joke was that nobody with any sense would ever think of taking anything of value to the beach in Rio.
On our way back to our apartment, still digesting what had happened, we passed a newsstand where a large headline on the only newspaper in English screamed:
SAN FRANCISCO DESTROYED BY EARTHQUAKE
A few lines, no details. Nothing in any other newspaper. Nothing we could do about it anyway. (Turned out it was a mere 5.8 quake across the bay in Livermore, barely felt in San Francisco.) It was the end of the day. Barefoot crowds were walking back from the beach, talking, teasing, laughing, flirting, many heading back to the ramshackle favelas we glimpsed on the hillsides. Nobody carried a bag, only rolled-up reed mats and, at most, a cruzeiro note tucked into the side string of her bikini. Precarnival drumbeats filled the languid air. Occasionally a group of people broke into a samba on their way down the street.
At first their pleasure grated on us. But then as the city’s ongoing party inexorably closed in around us, almost without realizing it, our gait loosened and our bodies began to sway. What was it about these Cariocas? Even though many clearly had next to nothing, they were unmistakably happy. Happier than most Americans we knew. Carefree. It was infectious.
Passing a samba school, packed with people dancing, we joined in. In a short time, we became mesmerized by the repetitive beat. We ended up at a wild nightclub, spent the few cruzeiros I had left in my pocket on a plate of rice and beans, and then danced in the streets with everyone else until we had only enough energy to stumble back to our bed.
The next morning, we went to seek advice from the only person we knew in town, the real estate agent.
“I have something for you,” the man said as we entered, happy to see us. He handed us our bag. Tickets, passports, and wallets were there, but no credit cards, traveler’s checks, or cash. But in Mel’s wallet was the receipt for the traveler’s checks. They could be replaced.
Dumbfounded, we asked him how he got the bag.
“You had my card in there,” he said. “Somebody found it on the beach.”
Three coffees arrived, so we sat down and told him about our night.
“Ah, you are learning about jeito.” He smiled proudly. “It’s what keeps us Cariocas going.” Roughly translated, it means “There is always a way.”
13
When All Else Fails, Expand
When we got back, did we ever need jeito.
I’m not sure what we expected to find, but it wasn’t walking in the door and seeing a half dozen chatty employees laughing and having coffee, oblivious to piles of mail that had yet to be opened and orders yet to be filled. When bulk mail will be delivered is always unpredictable. This time the catalogue hit much earlier than we anticipated. In the back room, the warehouse, there were heaps and heaps of unopened boxes filled with merchandise being returned from customers who had been sent the
wrong items. Our newly hired warehouse guy had decided to improve the pick-pack-ship system in which I’d trained him. Instead of packing one order at a time, he batched the orders, put them all in boxes, and then, at the end, went down the line attaching all the labels, which “somehow” got a bit “mixed up.”
That was just the start. The phones were ringing incessantly, far more than could be answered at any given time, with frustrated customers calling to place orders, or to ask where their orders were, or to complain about being sent the wrong stuff. Since all the lines were lit up, other customers behind them could only have been reaching busy signals.
It took Patricia and me more than a few gulps of jeito and weeks to clean up the mess. As much as we could.
Rio evaporated in a minute. Fixing the problems that occurred while we were away drained everything out of me. We wanted to put things right again. We gave it everything we had, all day long and every day of the week. “Failure is not a possibility” had been our motto all along, but with the post-Rio chaos, we came scarily close to a place where even the self-hypnosis of such mantras would not work. We both carried on. It would have been unthinkable for either of us to let the other down.
Nonetheless, by the time we got things back into a semblance of order, while Mel seemed to be still hanging on, I was beginning to crumble. Gone was a yoga practice that I had relied on for ten-plus years. Not enough sleep. Eating on the run. Too much coffee. No time for anything but keeping it all going. I was getting cranky, snapping at Mel. He was snapping back. We both knew that blaming each other was fruitless. We never ceased giving it everything we had, but for the first time, I began to question whether it was enough.
It was also becoming increasingly obvious to me that Mel and I were very different people. Mel was laserlike, searing right to the main issue, extracting the problem, and not letting it out of his grasp until he overcame it. My way was to sink in and absorb, trusting that the solution hiding in the problem would reveal itself to me. Where Mel paced in the overview, looking for how to rearrange things in a more workable order, I dug hands-on into the physical thick of things and worked my way out from there. That sometimes made me too slow for him. He could be too abstract for me. Usually we just ran on parallel tracks, and it didn’t matter. We would each get our work done in our own way. At times, however, we’d collide, and those collisions were happening too frequently. It was getting downright dangerous. When you are friends, spouses, and business partners all at once, fighting not only shakes up the life you’ve built together but also upsets the whole world around you, draining it of hope and energy. Everything is at stake: friendship, family, marriage, career, self-esteem. Our fights could be loud and fierce, although they usually evaporated quickly, leaving both of us a bit embarrassed afterward. Ultimately, we agreed on the big issues, until . . .