A Taste for Business–A Story from my Private Files
Dear friends,
I’ve been busy building Enliven Books, running Author’s Academy, and consulting with my clients and have not been writing much the last few months–and today I’ve recommitted to my writing. So, to get this started, I am going to post some stories and rough draft chapters that didn’t make it into “Life by the Cup” and were slated for other “by the cup” books. Initially, I wanted to publish a series: life by the cup, love by the cup, and business by the cup…etc…but when I left the tea company, I wanted to get as far from “the cup” as possible :). Not really possible since tea runs in my veins :). But anyway, some of these writings are rough, some a little risky, and I think you’ll find something useful in them. So here goes, this one is first draft, it’s about my first husband, ha :).
****
A Taste for Business
As my first husband took the step from the foyer into the cold night, he looked back and said to me, “I ruined you. You were an artist and I made you get into business and now you’re ruined.”
“Huh?” I replied. “How is being an artist different from being in business?” But he was out the door. I watched as he hoisted his suitcase into the back of his truck and sped away. Tire marks left a fading trail in the rainy street as his taillights disappeared.
I could have mourned, but instead I examined what he could have meant by he “ruined me with business,” and that I could no longer be “an artist.” Maybe I hadn’t realized I could be only one or the other. In my mind they existed simultaneously and non-exclusively. I wondered if I had gotten boring by helping him with his business. But he needed it so badly. Having dropped out of 9th grade to take over his parent’s business, he couldn’t spell, had a hard time reading, and had his manager for store #2 write all of his business letters. He was handsome and oddly charming with his crooked smile, considered the town’s most eligible bachelor at one point, he lassoed me after a pool game in a Kansas country bar and we got married within three months of knowing each other.
I always thought he just knew what he wanted, and that made him a killer businessman who would take over the Midwest with his chain of electronics stores. I wanted to make him a mogul, and fantasized that we would be so rich that we’d run away to Paris, buy a flat in the 5th and spend our days sipping red wine, writing Pulitzer perfect poetry and making love to Gypsy music. Ahhhh. This fantasy made it easy for me to accept quiet Kansas living as a former wild child California girl.
I settled right in and focused on filling our 1887 Victorian’s 20 rooms with Bohemian antiques, exotic tropical plants, Brazilian crystal clusters, east Indian embroidered curtains and Czech floor pillows. I took up painting, opened my formal dining room for palm readings, and threw elaborate weekly dinner parties for local artists, professors, college friends, neighbors, the exotic contingent of psychics and even a few white witches, which we called “herbalists.”
In our short-lived marriage, we opened a couple more stores in his chain and it inspired me. Remodeling grungy industrial warehouses into posh showrooms for cutting edge sound systems felt immensely romantic, the art of music and the nuts and bolts of speakers, amps, surround sound and speaker talk was a turn on to be honest. We sketched, dreamed, signed leases and navigated young love with wonder.
I talked him into state of the art sound rooms with race car bucket seats and touch screens, so his customers could envision themselves in their very own Ferrari (and buy the stereo from this fantasy). I talked him into new carpet, cool uniforms for his staff, and upgraded showrooms. Having gone to school for creative writing, I saw everything in my husband’s business as a form of poetry, a story woven from his ambitions. He went along with it, at least for a while.
We had had so much fun, I thought. Creating harmony among the once disingenuous employees who’d hated each other. Creating sales growth by holding contests that turned past rivalries between locations into profits for us. I hired graffiti street artists to paint massive murals on the side of his buildings. It had worked with taggers and gang bangers in my rough neighborhood back in California, so why wouldn’t it work in Joplin, Missouri and Pittsburg, Kansas?
I ran from store to store in my husband’s truck, with Janis Joplin blaring, checking on the projects, overseeing painters, bringing beer to my husband during huge installs. The competitors called me his “secret weapon” and that to me was kick ass. Being my husband’s secret weapon felt like my destiny.
Soon, the employees complained less and worked more. Absenteeism all but disappeared. The contests I set up between stores got the managers to stop holding back inventory when the other was out of something, they would even drive it over to help out. Withholding information like jealous children ended and where once there was conflict we now had familial competitiveness that harmed no one and benefitted morale and the bottom line. I was on top of the world!
My husband had never considered fun to be an essential part of business, he saved fun for the bar down the street after hours. He marveled that managing people wasn’t such a chore. I had never considered it otherwise. I had had bad bosses and great bosses. The extent of my professional life had been as a nonprofit volunteer, wood stacker, busgirl, waitress, latch-key kid art teacher, babysitter, shop girl and palm reader. I loved to work, and even more, I loved to make people happy. I didn’t know what a balance sheet or profit and loss statement was but I knew that money followed creativity and responded to pleasure like magic.
I loved my husband’s business because it gave me a platform to use my creativity in real time. I read tarot cards for the employees and coached them on how to go vegan. I wrote ad copy and hosted big employee parties to celebrate benchmarks like opening another store, expanding product offerings, hitting sales numbers, speeding up installs and creating funny radio ads. The employees seemed grateful, I was thrilled, and then my husband divorced me and told me I was “ruined.”
A year after he dumped me. He flew out to California to see me again. I’d lost everything in the divorce, because I signed a document that said I’d surrender all claims. I didn’t know what it meant because I’d not gotten my own lawyer. So, I left with less than I entered with. At this point I was still broke, renting a room next to the nunnery in Santa Barbara, taking creative writing and journalism classes to finish my degree and stealing oranges off of the neighbor’s tree in order to eat. He arrived and took me to dinner, and professed that I had been the single most important person in his life, and I had taught him the most important things he knew of business. He told me I had been the key to his businesses booming success, he’d doubled revenues through the programs I’d put in place, and then said, “Zhena, it’s such a turn on, just seeing you, will you f*ck me, for old time’s sake?”
I looked down at my wear worn dress and wondered why he was rich and I was poor if I had been so important to him. And how on earth did he have the guts to brag about his numbers after screwing me out of my only asset in the divorce—my car.
His stores were booming, profits through the roof and he had acquired another chain in another state, he was telling me that I had made all that difference for him? And now he wanted to get laid. I watched him smile sloppily and hopefully. He playfully took a bite of his steak, attempting to be sexy, and the oil from the fat made his lips shiny. As a vegan, it was just gross to me. I looked down at my dressing free salad and wondered why I lived like such a martyr. I ordered another glass of wine and drank it quickly, still not answering him. Listening to him was torture. He’d bought a boat and a second house on the lake. He had gone to Fiji with his hairdresser, the one he was seeing before we got married. He was thinking about a Carrera 911, and what did I think? Or should he go for a new Boxter?
I watched the sharp blade of his knife and fantasized about chasing him out of the restaurant with it in my hand. He’d run so scared that he’d drop his wallet and I’d pick it up, finding enough cash for my rent and a new pair of shoes.
“Zhena, hey Zhena, where’d you go?” he interrupted, waving his hand in front of my face.
“Oh, I’m sorry, just thinking about homework, I better go.” I said getting up.
“Whaaaa?!? I came all the way out to Cali to see you and you’ve got homework? Seriously?” He waved the thought away as he reached for his beer. He looked down at his crotch then back up at me, hinting without class a specialty of his.
“You’re doing great, and I’m happy for you,” I said, motioning for the waitress. Standing, I straightened out my dress and felt embarrassed when I noticed a drop of wine right between my breasts. “Good God,” I thought, “Can’t I have just a sliver of dignity!?”
He felt for his wallet and said, “I must have forgotten my wallet, Z, you’ve got this, right? Seeing how you are all successful living in California and all,” he smiled. “I came all the way out here to see you, least you can do is pick up a meal.”
Paying the bill left me with pennies. I walked to his hotel with him, hoping he’d pay me back, but all he did was try to kiss me. Shoving his hand up my skirt, and fumbling around my underwear, he whispered in my ear, “Let me repay you with this..”
I ran from him.
Needless to say, Husband #1 left a bad taste in my mouth for business…but tea eventually cleansed it.
