HOM: Epic Fail

Jerry pulled the plug on the partnership at the end of 1983, the inequalities in the store were too much for him to handle. His words, somewhat in the heat of the moment, were "You're robbing the store blind!" He made me the offer of cash plus splitting off the gun show business to me, or cash plus the store while he kept the gun books. Either way, he wanted out. This caught me off guard, and really put me in a quandary. I thought about it for a few days, ignored Lyn's desire for me to get a real job with better pay, ignored the inlaw's advice to take the money and run, and made Jerry a counter offer: double what he had offered me and I'd keep both parts of the business. I intended it to shake him, and it did. I'd hoped he'd reconsider the partnership and go on with me, but he really wanted out. He took the offer. Yeah, my two big failures in life were partnership and marriage, and I guess they were inter-related. I like to think I'd have been a better friend and associate without the pressures and problems from home, but that's one of the things I'll never know. Dad gave me some "I told you so" comments along the line that partnerships never work. Dunno, maybe he was right, but that wasn't much consolation. This was one of the low points in my life. I thought that the store income as a sole owner would be enough to service a loan plus give me some added income, but I reckoned without some of the customers: when Jerry left, a number of the more affluent customers left. This, combined with my reliance on Jerry as the real brains of the store and the errors I made on my own after he left, made me worse off money-wise than I had ever been. TBC (Me) (Blacktail Books)