Use What You'Ve Got And Other Business Lessons I Learned from My Mom

1 If You Don't Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your PigtailsThe story of my billion-dollar business starts like this: I borrowed a thousand dollars from a friend. Okay, I didn't borrow it. He gave it to me. And he wasn't a friend. He was a boyfriend. But when I moved into my first apartment on East Eighty-sixth Street with two roommates, I did have a thousand dollars to start a real estate company. It seemed so simple. There'd be virtually no overhead! I'd probably rent two, maybe even three, apartments a day, and we'd be running at a profit by the second Sunday of every month. "All the rest will be gravy," I told my business partner/boyfriend, Ramòne Simòne. "And we'll share the gravy evenly," he added. Or almost evenly-49 percent for me and 51 percent for him. After all, he explained, he was the one risking the money. * I was wiping the counter of the Fort Lee Diner the first time Ramòne walked in. It was a quiet night. There were only a few customers in the diner, and the other waitress, Gloria, had them all. Well, Gloria and her two well-rounded friends. Gloria was built like Dolly Parton with a big bleached-blond swirl of cotton candy hair. Her breasts were the specialty of the house and had the power to lure men off the street, even if they weren't hungry. She could carry six cups of coffee stacked on top of them, and never spill a drop. Gloria and her dynamic duo had put the Fort Lee Diner on the map, and watching the twins bounce around the diner had become sport in Fort Lee. I was watching her work the front section and, in an effort to feel busy, I was wiping the barren Formica landscape in front of me with a soggy white rag. The double aluminum doors at the far end of the diner opened and in walked my destiny. I knew he was there before I ever looked up. With his dark skin and jet-black hair, he was unlike the working-class customers who frequented the place. In his blue aviator shades, he was different, probably from a land very far away. At least across the river, I figured. I had seen his crisp, white flat collar and rich dark suit on only one other person in my twenty-one years-Irvin Rosenthal, the elderly owner of the Palisades Amusement Park. The Park hovered atop the cliff above our house like a blinking, flashing, whirring spaceship. During the summers of my childhood, when Mr. Rosenthal drove down Undercliff Avenue in his black limousine, all the kids of Edgewater ran up to his car like chickens to the feet of a farmer's wife, each of us hoping to get more than our fair share of free ride tickets. In his finery, Mr. Rosenthal was like a king. We all knew he was rich. Besides the fact that he owned the amusement park, he just smelled different from all of us river rats. Ramòne smelled different, too, I decided, even from across the room and over the thick aroma of frying bacon and eggs. Instead of asking to sit in Gloria's station, he looked at the manager and, with a quick lift of his chin, pointed toward me, the young innocent behind the counter. He walked across the diner, strutting like a pigeon. My eyes met his blue aviator shades. Finally, I thought, as he took a seat at the second stool, an interesting customer. He ordered a cup of tea, and while I banged in and out of the swinging kitchen door, he sat and sipped it, hardly moving, just watching as I worked my counter. I loved my counter. It was my territory, and everything that went on there was under my control. There were nine stools and every third one had a setup: glass sugar container, ketchup bottle, salt and pepper shakers, and a tin filled with white napkins. Since I was stuck behind the counter face-to-face with my customers, I often served as their dinner companion. So I made the most of it and entertained them with conversation. Ramòne told me he was from the "Basque Country." I didn't knoCorcoran, Barbara is the author of 'Use What You'Ve Got And Other Business Lessons I Learned from My Mom', published 2003 under ISBN 9781591840022 and ISBN 1591840023.