Still Partying Like It’s 1999

I first met Nero at our fiancé’s graduate program award ceremony a couple of years ago. He was a Persian fellow with satanic facial hair, a first generation immigrant, and a small business owner at 26 years old. We talked for five minutes, and part of me knew that he would play a significant role in my life.

While I don’t really believe in reincarnation, this is one of three times in my life in which I met someone I felt like I already knew. Maybe he was a camel trader in a desert oasis a few centuries ago while I, the daughter of a rich merchant, a flower of the mountain, fanned with palm fronds and dressed in precious jewels, peeked out of my shaded caravan and made eye contact with him. Maybe he smiled and I shyly pulled back the white cloth shade and demanded fresh dates from my eunuch, who combed my pretty hair and clucked at me not to pay mind to the locals. You never know.

We met again at his fiancé’s birthday party. He pointed at the saffron in the rice and said, “this stuff is more expensive than drugs!”* and before long, he was rolling in hysterical laughing fits on the floor after ingesting something that was just as expensive as drugs, that is to say, was in fact drugs.

We met again on New Year’s Eve, and didn’t talk much at a dinner, despite the fact that I was unemployed and tentatively putting out feelers so as to entertain the possibility of re-entering the work force and I thought “Maybe I didn’t know him in a past life, maybe I wasn’t the daughter of a rich merchant, and maybe my whole life has been a lie!”

Then last week we met for his fiancé’s birthday party again. I asked him about his business. He took me aside and said, “I don’t know. I feel like all that I have been working for in the past five years I’m starting to lose. We are being forced to turn down work because we can’t afford to hire someone, and we have this great new software that is just a couple of months away from being released. Can you come into work next week and maybe give me some advice?”

This ship had already set sail, and I was powerless to prevent it from porting. I felt, in our first encounter, that part of my psyche was sighing, saying, “here we go again,” not as a harbinger of anything good or bad, just a sign of a path already trod.

On Monday, I stopped by the office for a brief meeting and left six hours later. I returned, sat in on a couple of meetings, and then we negotiated. I will own a small piece of his company after a year’s worth of work while getting paid just enough to cover my personal bills.**

In our negotiations, as I attempted to calculate on the fly the value of each percentage of ownership in a company of which I had imperfect information, I asked for more than what he offered and Nero recoiled momentarily. He had spent years upon years trying to make the business work, had friends and family investing and at key times keeping it afloat. He recalled times in which through force of will he closed deals with companies that had no business doing business with a kid and a dream. He asked himself why he should trust me, why he was trusting me, why his blink reaction was not only to trust me but to bring me in, and he grabbed my outstretched hand with both of his, and looked me in the eye, and asked me if I could help take his company to the next level.

With a heart full of self-doubt, with a body that had been riding this wave of energy I felt powerless to control, and with a resolution to do everything I could to help turn the company into a vast empire, I said “Yes. Yes, absolutely.”

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*A pound of dry saffron (0.45 kg) requires 50,000–75,000 flowers, the equivalent of a football field's area of cultivation. Some forty hours of frenetic day-and-night labor are needed to pick 150,000 flowers.

**I wrote down my fixed monthly costs today:

• Brazilian Jui Jitsu
  
• Rent
  
• Utilities
  
• Time Warner (broadband Internet)
  
• Cell phone
  
• Auto and moto insurance
  
• Health insurance (major medical, $3000 deductible - $60/month)
  
• Gas
  
• Groceries
  
• Flavored and scented lubricants
  
• Little Penguin Cabernet (purchased in bulk)