He called me one day to ask where all the deposit money was and I told him what I was doing. He was furious, but I reminded him that the store was still open and functional and that I as an owner and shareholder had a responsibility to act in the company’s best interest. He hung up on me.

Paying for all that stock out-of-pocket and skimming the profit for the good of the store paid off tremendously- between “Black Friday” and Christmas Eve, we had done $27,000 in sales. It was phenomenal; it seemed like every day during that period that we were breaking the previous day’s record. But still, doom hung heavy over us like poisoned mistletoe and there was almost a wartime mentality at the store. We had several impromptu “save the store” meetings where my employees and our regulars would talk about what they needed to do to help. Everyone wanted to do something, anything, to keep the store going. Some offered to work for free. Some offered money. That’s how important this place was to these people. It was almost heartbreaking seeing their enthusiasm and knowing that The Barrister’s legacy of debt could very well end it all- and in less than a month.

I’ll never forget the days leading up to Christmas Eve. Spirits were high despite the possibility of annihilation. Many of our regulars were leaving to go home to their parents’ for the holidays and all came by the store before they left. I can’t help but think that some of them wondered if the store would be open when they got back. Those that weren’t going home for the holidays still came in almost every day and we were all really into playing STAR WARS MINIATURES around that time- we were sitting around, eating Christmas cookies and staging these ridiculous battles: fifty Stormtroopers versus five Jedi, Ewoks versus Power Droids, and Bounty Hunters versus an AT-ST. All in all, it felt like family.

Christmas came and went, the week after mostly filled with people predictably coming in to exchange duplicate copies of MUNCHKIN or to trade unwanted gifts of the wrong Warhammer 40K miniatures. We had sold a lot of gift certificates but our shelves were so bare that many were disappointed, promising to come back sometime in a couple of weeks- unaware that the store may not be around in a couple of weeks.

In retrospect, I had a lot of hope despite the feeling that things were ending. I really thought that Dollar Bill and I were going to pull it off- we’d get The Barrister effectively paid off and out of the partnership and then we’d be in a position to take all that momentum where it seemed to be heading before we hit such a harsh speed bump.

Above all, I felt like it was inevitable, what was happening. Growing pains. Something we’d look back on in a year as a milepost of how far we’d come. The Barrister, the day he got fired, the laughable negotiations, the checkbook incident- all things that would become part of the AGF legend, its history, and its formative years. New Year’s Day wasn’t without positive sentiment and confidence that good and right would win out over greed ran high. We were really looking forward to getting past the last vestiges of The Barrister’s involvement with AGF.

January 6, 2006.

That was the day we had set aside for our “final negotiations” with The Barrister. I had gone to the local distributor to pick up some items that day and they had several copies of the revised edition of LORD OF THE RINGS: THE CONFRONTATION, a game Dollar Bill and I had played seventeen times the night we bought the original version some years past. I was pretty excited that we’d get to check it out together and when he arrived at the store that day, he was eager to give it a shot. We pulled out all the pieces, looked at the new characters and cards, and even set it up but we realized that we needed to head out- we were going to dinner at the pasta joint around the corner before our meeting with The Barrister. I left The Kid in charge of the store and most of our core group of regulars came in before we left to show their support and to wait for us to return with good news.

We talked a lot at dinner about what we were going to do, about what we were going to say. And about what our contingency plan was if things went wrong. The thing about it all was that for Dollar Bill there really wasn’t much at stake- he’d lose some money at worst but write it off on his taxes. If everything fell through, I’d be losing not only my sole source of income but also everything I had worked so hard to establish. Something that I’ve learned about the wealthy is that sometimes they fail to see how the stakes in situations like this are not the same for people who aren’t making a million dollars a year- and when Dollar Bill talked about how we needed to be willing to just walk out, it seemed like a nightmare scenario that could ruin me financially.

We came up with a plan. We would make him a final offer that was less than the offer we had made before. We felt that he was likely desperate enough to avoid bankruptcy that he would take whatever he could get. The amount was still enough for him to walk away debt free, but it also reflected that the store was at around a fifty percent stock level and was not yet profitable due to the debt burden. We weren’t really going to negotiate; we were going to make him a final offer to save himself. The Barrister thought that Dollar Bill’s wealth, my commitment to the store, and the friendships between the two of us were his key points of leverage but we had the upper hand- we were offering him the rest of his life without the debt he had racked up on the store’s behalf. And we were ready to walk out of the meeting if he tried to pressure or strong-arm us into a bad deal.