Just before Thanksgiving The Barrister suddenly showed up out of nowhere at AGF. He came in one afternoon, and acted like absolutely nothing had happened. He was nice to everyone, but strangely quiet. While games were going on all around him, he sat in one of the Ikea chairs in one of those overstuffed North Face jackets with elbows on knees, chin in hands, quietly watching the life of the store pass by. I can’t help but think that he felt resentment that the store was succeeding without him. Some of our regulars had been fairly close to The Barrister from the earliest days of the store so they talked to him and it was discovered that he was back doing paralegal work at a local law firm. He looked sullen, defeated, and he said very little to me and I almost nothing to him.

By this point, Dollar Bill and I knew why he seemed to be in such dire straits although it took us a long time to realize the extent of his personal crisis. Simply put, his investment in the store had crippled him. Not because the store wasn’t performing well, but because his entire stake in the company had been leveraged on debt and because of that every dime the store could have been making as profit was going toward making minimum payments.

We knew he had borrowed, but we didn’t know until much too late that every penny he had put into the business was from a second mortgage and credit cards- he had tens of thousands of dollars worth of credit card debt alone. Not a single dollar he had invested into the business was solvent, and that made over half of our business completely leveraged on high-interest borrowing. All the money we were making was going to pay off his debt instead of growing the business. That meant he either had to go or the store would never survive. He resorted to begging Dollar Bill for severance pay and enough money to make it through Christmas.

We met with him one day in early December at his new office to discuss getting him out of the picture completely- which would mean saving the store from his debt burden. Our offer was basically to completely bail out the whole of his debt, leaving him free and clear with absolutely no financial obligation to the store whatsoever. This was a fair deal because at the time, the net worth of the store and its assets were valued just about as much as his debt burden. Given that his share was just over half, we were essentially paying him a lot of money just to go away.

But it wasn’t good enough—the asking price for his share was literally twice what we were offering…an insane amount that Dollar Bill and I could have used to open an all new, fully stocked store. The fact of the matter was that AGF was so saddled with debt due to The Barrister that he was trying to sell us a share in an insolvent business with a bad prognosis. We couldn’t reach an agreement so we arranged a meeting after New Years to decide what we were going to do; liquidation was discussed as a possibility, and if The Barrister couldn’t be persuaded to back out, then it would almost certainly be the end of AGF.

I knew exactly what was happening though. The Barrister was trying to strong-arm us into a suboptimal deal that would not only bail him out but also turn a profit for him as well. He knew that Dollar Bill and I really wanted to save the store. The Barrister also knew that Dollar Bill had the money to buy the whole thing outright if he really wanted to and his whole strategy was likely predicated on a kind of brinksmanship—he probably assumed that we’d wear down and give into his ludicrous demands rather than watch the store go under.

But that wily Barrister, he had a trick up his sleeve that we didn’t anticipate. He was the primary name on the bank account. And he basically took the checkbook away, literally and figuratively, which made it almost impossible for us to do orders and get in new stock. He told us that there wouldn’t be any orders until we had an agreement. And there was really nothing we could do about it since we were on the books as The Barrister Doing Buisness as Atlanta Game Factory. That was a huge mistake. We should have been on the account as well, but we never anticipated this turn of events. Maybe he did.

So we were on borrowed time in December, although with the traffic in the store you’d never know it. From the day after Thanksgiving on through Christmas, the store was slammed almost non-stop with people I had never seen walk through the doors. The local paper printed one of those “Board Games Make Great Gifts” articles and I had twenty people coming in a day asking for games like BUY WORD. SETTLERS OF CATAN might as well have been an Xbox 360 at AGF, it was just as scarce. The shelves were being stripped bare- literally- and without the ability to place orders in that first week of the Christmas season we were already pretty much completely incapacitated due to The Barrister’s checkbook blockade.

But he didn’t count on me fighting back. I started saving the cash we made so that instead of putting it in the Monday morning deposit envelope I could go to the post office and get a money order to pay our COD orders and keep product coming into the store. I actually paid for a lot of merchandise out of my own pocket just to keep things on the shelf so we could actually make some money and I couldn’t see losing literally thousands of dollars worth of sales every day because of The Barrister’s chosen bullying tactic.