your way back to your hotel, you’ll have a lot to think about. Maybe a direction will reveal itself. Peace be with you, Paul; maybe we will meet again. I hope so.”
After walking for a while, I realized there was no way I’d ever fall asleep with all these thoughts bouncing around in my head. I had made my way down Boulevard Montparnasse and saw it was late enough that I could get a cozy outside table at La Coupole. I sat down and ordered a beer. And almost immediately a young Parisian couple wearing amazing coats sat down beside me.
“Excusez-moi, monsieur, vous avoir une cigarette,” came a request in French with a German accent.
“Would you like a Marlboro?” I responded as he held up two fingers and said thank you in almost perfect English. With only a week in Paris, I was certainly jealous and surprised at how many Europeans spoke two or three languages. It was so different from the States. It was an ability I’d like to have myself someday.
“Where are you from?” he asked as we moved a little closer to each other.
“Chicago,” I answered as I lit all three of our cigarettes.
“Danke,” came his reply in German. “Have you been in Paris before?”
“No, my first time. I love it. Unfortunately, it’s very expensive. I had hoped to get a job here, but that’s not going to work out. Do you live in Paris or do you travel here often?”
“We live in London. We’re just stopping in Paris for a day or two on our way back from Moscow.”
“Are you traveling for fun or business? I’ve seen some people here wearing the same kind of coats both of you are wearing. So different, where did you buy them?”
“Well, we just like to travel. We travel, really, just to travel. We make some money here and there along the way. The coats are sheepskins from Afghanistan. I’d like to have fifty more of them; they are beginning to be the thing in Europe, and they are so hip. We bought our coats in Moscow from this guy who just came back from Kabul in Afghanistan. He was honest with us; he bought each one for $5-$10, and he sold them to us for $200 each. I could sell them for more than that to my friend Freddie who owns the Granny Takes a Trip boutique on Kings Row in London.”
It didn’t take long to have the proverbial light bulb go berserk, blinking wildly in my head. This was interesting, this was more than interesting, and this was exciting. I could do this; I could be rich. Afghanistan! Wow, of all the places as I thought of the world, I’d have to say Afghanistan had never come up. Where was that in relation to India? It seemed like a long way away, a very long way away. At that moment I blurted, “Afghanistan? How would you ever get there?”
“Well, there might be a number of ways to get there, but if I were you, I’d take The Orient Express,” my new acquaintance responded. “That would be so cool. I’ve never ridden on it, but you can catch it right here in Paris. Are you thinking about buying some coats and selling them?”
I think he kept on talking for another minute or two, but immediately upon hearing the words “The Orient Express” I was gone, again starting to daydream about sitting in a luxurious train car streaking through Eastern Europe on my way east to the exotic, to adventure, to halfway around the world, to Asia. Now that just might be the start of what could be “My Story.” How in a million years could Caesar have known that I would find my story so soon?
Back to reality and answering my new friend, I said, “Could I? I mean, can someone with no experience just go to some far-off place and buy some things and sell them and make a lot of money?”
“Well, there are people already starting to do just that. Maybe you could also.”
“Maybe I could.”
Not long after, they left. I ordered another beer and watched it begin to rain again as I let my mind drift. What was happening? Was I really thinking about going to Afghanistan? Was I thinking I could buy some coats and drag them 1,000-2,000 miles across the earth and then sell them? This was exciting, but was it also crazy? Was this me? Was I thinking about, well…I guess, maybe some would call it…an adventure? Was I just a regular guy? I don’t think regular guys wake up most mornings and say to themselves, “I’m going to have adventures.” Regular guys get up in the morning and go to their jobs, pick up some groceries on the way home and then spend the evening looking at a baseball game on TV, take the dog out for a quick walk and then go to bed watching Johnny Carson. Remember, I’m the guy who wanted to get a job, albeit a pretty neat job, in Paris and live here and do the things most would do living in a large international city. Hopping on one of the world’s most glamorous trains and traveling halfway around the world to negotiate and buy pounds and pounds of exotic coats and then lugging them back to London, a city I had yet to visit, was not regular-guy stuff. As the rain continued to fall, I tried to look through the raindrops for some clue…some hint of what I should do. Was this thinking just too wild? Who was I to think I could start a business out of nowhere with no research? My dad was a corporate guy; we weren’t an entrepreneurial family. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I did not know the clothing business at all, I didn’t even know how to begin to find out. This was feeling more and more half-baked.
Then I remembered. Paul, you’ve already experienced half-baked with your plan of coming over to Paris in the first place, cold, unprepared and thinking you could end up with some great advertising art director’s job and have a life out of a Hemingway novel. Remember how well that has gone so far.
How could I ever decide? And if I decided that any idea like buying coats in Afghanistan should be way off the table and decide against it, then what? Do I just give up and go home? I had miscalculated on how much French I would have to know. It seemed I’d never learn the language quickly enough to get a job. My savings wouldn’t last that long. So, what then? Stay a couple more weeks here or maybe travel a little to one or two more countries and then go home? Is that what life is? Daydreaming about big things, big adventurers, but ultimately coming back to reality and letting those ideas disappear in puffs of smoke? Hmm? I continued to daydream as I watched the rain fall.
Twenty minutes later I was bounding up the stairs in the Hotel Namur and knocking emphatically on Doug’s door. Yelling, “Get up, fucker, I’ve got it; we’re going to be rich!”
Opening his door and looking somewhat annoyed but intrigued, he said, “What is going on? How much wine have you had tonight? And what do you mean rich?”
“OK, sit down and give me some of that wine you’re drinking and hold on to your hat; I’ve come up with the idea of ideas. If you are up for it, tomorrow morning we are going to get tickets on The Orient Express headed for India. When we get to India or maybe Afghanistan, we are going to—now hold on to your socks—we’re going to buy as many sheepskin coats as we can. Then we are going to lug them back to London, sell them and then we are going to be rich.”
“You are incredible. You come knocking on my door with not one outlandish idea, but three out-of-this-world ideas. Why in a million years do you think we could do that? But I’ll give you credit, you’ve got a mind-blowing kind of wild imagination. Did someone give you some pot or hashish on top of your wine tonight?” Doug shook his head.
“I met this German guy and girl, they were coming back from Moscow, and they had these beautiful coats that you and I have been noticing here in Paris. He told me this guy who sold them the coats had recently bought them in Afghanistan and that he only paid about $5 for each of them. The German guy then says he knows he could sell them in London for about $250 each. Listen, we could pool our money and buy, say, 200 coats, sell them and pocket $50,000!”
We
