September 13–15, 1993
The alcohol trade turned out to be an unpredictable, nonlinear nervous ordeal. Zhorik had missed the mark with the Khryakino warehouse. Buyers ignored the suggestion of trekking out to the far reaches of the Moscow region. They wanted to feel what they’d paid for, here and now. The mythical wholesale buyers with briefcases full of dollars Zhorik had dreamed of simply didn’t exist in our universe. Crowding around the till were market-stall traders, who considered blue and pink brick-sized wads of banknotes bound with hair-curler elastics to be legal tender.
We had to arrange to rent a «GAZ-3307» truck from the plant, load it up with vermouth, vodka, and champagne, send it to Kalyazinsky, unload it, haul everything up to the second floor, deal with the crush and crowding, sell, carry, hand out. Phew…
We fixed the logistics the next day. The «Gazon» belonged to the plant. Zhorik arranged in no time to have the truck and driver put at our disposal. No more hauling boxes off the bed into the office and back out to the yard.
We parked the «Gazon» in the courtyard and sold straight off the truck bed. The office got roomier. Yurik sat in the truck bed, I sat at the computer. Buyers would dash in to dump cash on the cashier and get an invoice from me.
By the end of the week we’d built up contacts with a dozen stall owners, who promised to become regulars as long as we didn’t mess anything up on our end, and, more importantly, we learned to politely turn down the sharp operators demanding guarantees and discounts. We’d frown, recite the commandments of the Russian merchant: «Don’t trust, don’t fear, don’t beg! Cash to the till, goods on the barrelhead!!! Guarantees only at the morgue and at wholesale bases not yet privatized. The law of the jungle rules here. Don’t like it? The door’s that way. Next!»
The first week’s results looked promising. «Proma Impex» brought in three thousand dollars, eight hundred of which turned out to be clean profit.
Ha!
Friday evening, we cracked open a box of vermouth and company — me, Yurik, Gena, plus Masha, who’d tagged along — and marked the end of our first working week. Masha hauled in a genuine ghetto blaster, Gena pulled a cassette out of his Walkman, and the Terem thundered: «Of all the collective-farm youth, I was the only one who went punk…»
