But in the hours right after court, there was the expected flurry of phone calls to Dollar Bill, The Kid, the other employees, select regulars, my parents, and so forth. The story was told and retold. And all day long I thought about the kids that were going to show up for Friday Night Magic and find the doors locked. I drove by to see if perhaps The Barrister had the store open and there was a handwritten sign on the door that said “Closed due to family emergency”. Most people know that “family emergencies” are up there with “creative differences” in terms of excuses and one of my biggest fears was that people were going to think that we had gone out of business or that the store had failed. We hadn’t yet, whether I was barred from the store or not.

I was also more than a bit freaked out because almost my entire game collection was still in the store along with who knows how many DVDs, CDs, and other personal belongings. Dollar Bill also had a lot of stuff in the store. We talked about the possibility of having him arrested for theft by taking but the situation was such that we didn’t really know what we could do. The Barrister was the majority shareholder, and what he did seemed really, really illegal but any action was really in Dollar Bill’s hands- I didn’t have a lawyer and I didn’t know anything about how to proceed. I just never expected that it would come to all this and I was really kind of powerless in the situation. We didn’t have anything formal regarding our business partnership, we didn’t have share certificates and The Barrister’s name was pretty much the only one on all of our documentation. That was a gross oversight on our part.

Although he had an attorney and even more money tied up in the store than I did, Dollar Bill didn’t do anything. He talked a lot about taking some kind of legal action, about taking steps to file a complaint with the Georgia Bar Association since The Barrister had mismanaged his relationship with his other company. He talked about giving The Barrister another chance to negotiate and get the store back in our hands. He talked about just starting over with a whole new store. But Dollar Bill talks a lot about a lot things, most of which never come to fruition.

So he did nothing. He was wealthy and the store was just kind of an extension of the hobby to him. He didn’t expect to get much out of it and he didn’t depend on its success. It was a frivolity, the new Corvette wrapped around a telephone pole with no one injured and no repercussion. He talked a lot, but he never said anything about just shrugging it off. Which is what I knew he would do the day after the Occupation of Atlanta Game Factory began. The long, slow grinding down of my respect for Dollar Bill had already started some time before, but it accelerated greatly as I watched him laugh about this whole situation and treat it like a millionaire’s peccadillo.

The immediate reality of the situation for me was that I was suddenly without a job- I had no income right after the holidays and conveniently right after buying a new car. But more than that, everything I had worked for over two years was suddenly in the hands of someone else, everything I had worked to develop, build, and cultivate was suddenly occupied and in the hands of a hostile and incompetent enemy. I felt devastated, lost, and deeply depressed.

I was also really worried that The Barrister would say, do, or act in ways that would discredit the Atlanta Game Factory name so I started a campaign of my own to make sure that our landlord, distributors, business contacts, customers, and friends knew exactly what the situation was and that anything coming from The Barrister should not be considered sanctioned, endorsed, or supported by Atlanta Game Factory. I still had remote access to our email account and I had email addresses for hundreds of customers. I contacted everybody I could to let them know what was happening. I went online and spread the word about what was happening and I tried to be as optimistic as possible- “we’re on hiatus until we get this situation sorted out was my chief message. I didn’t want to let it go and I wanted the Atlanta gaming community, who had supported us and made us what we were, to know that we were trying to get back into the store and get everything sorted out.

The occupied Atlanta Game Factory reopened not even a week after The Barrister staged his coup. Over the weekend, The Barrister had apparently contacted all of the employees and asked them to come back to work. Billy Motion, Tiny, The Kid, Hot Karl, and the others all refused to do so- their fealty lay with me and my vision of AGF. So he went and hired back some of the old employees from before the time I had assumed control of the store and apparently hired on a couple of his gym buddies to fill out the schedule— none of whom knew anything about gaming at all. The store hours were changed to 12-8 every day and apparently all standing events were to continue. I know all of this because I had The Kid spying on the store daily to keep track of any activity and several of the regulars were reporting back to me as a kind of fifth column. Many still communicated with The Barrister and were in his confidence to some degree.

By all accounts, the store was a dead zone. There was practically no business, events that had been well attended barely days before were now barren. Stock was low and a general sense of doom seemed to be settling in with the AGF crowd and crew. But some folks assumed that the store was just continuing on and there were a few posts online that announced that Atlanta Game Factory was back, open for business and carrying on as before. To the outside world, and to newer customers who had not been really aware of who we were or what the AGF culture was, it was just another store and they likely didn’t notice the drastic change. Some did, and apparently I was asked for many times by customers who knew me. They were told that I “no longer worked there.”