Innocent Spouse (32 page)

In the bare living room, I got down on the floor and stretched out on my back. I gestured for Spencer to do the same. We looked up at the high ceiling. The empty socket for a chandelier stared back at us, wires dangling. My eyes scanned the pale yellow walls, the empty bookcases, the fireplace and mantel, and the big bay window that captured the deepening twilight. We held hands. We were silent, each lost in our own thoughts. This was our starting point, the first leg of a fresh voyage. We lay there on the floor of our new home, and when we rolled our heads to the side to look at each other, we smiled. I pulled him close, wrapped my arms around him, and put his head on my shoulder. Yes, this was a beginning. And so far it was good.

B
EYOND FREEDOM
, I don’t know what I expected of my life after the IRS had finished with me. Looking back, my naïveté was alarming. With the money the settlement left in my pocket—maybe half a million—I paid the IRS $118,000 to “buy” Nathans back from them, and I paid off more than $150,000 of various Nathans’ debts, including taxes owed to the District of Columbia. The vendor debt that sat on Nathans’ books was still more than a quarter of a million. Connie said such debt was “routine” in the restaurant business. That kind of routine required the guts of a riverboat gambler. Clearly, once again, this was not the business for me, but for now I was stuck with it—and partly by my own doing.

Howard’s corporation was dissolved and Miriam set up my own limited liability corporation, or LLC, which I optimistically named “New Day.” The rest of the money I put into the house, a tuition fund for Spencer, and some savings for me. We were luckier than many. We had a roof over our heads and food on the table. I thought my challenges were behind me.

That turned out to be a delusion. The problems kept coming, like tornadoes on an open plain. Not all of them had to do with Nathans, but most of them did. There was the lease and rent and an unexpected fight for my liquor license, but some of the challenges came from outside any rational expectation: exploding manhole covers in the streets and terrorists in planes in the skies. Call these developments what you will, tornadoes, avalanches, horror, but they never took a break, and each made Nathans less appealing to a buyer.

T
HE FIRST ORDER
of business was a new lease. Out from under the IRS, we no longer needed to go month-to-month. Now, I needed a
good long lease to boost the value of the business to its highest possible level so I could sell it for top dollar. I’d been told by successful local developers and commercial property professionals that $2 million was not an unreasonable expectation. From what I’d been learning about Nathans, that tantalizing figure seemed too good to be true, but who was I to argue with the “experts”?

What I did know was that once the general lease terms were agreed upon, the rent would have to be reduced for Nathans to survive. The landlords didn’t agree. For them, it worked well as it was. Just as Mr. Joynt had spoiled Howard by subsidizing him for years, Howard had spoiled the Halkias family by honoring an old-school lease that had been written in 1969, essentially the dark ages, in which he agreed to pay a record-high rent, property taxes, insurance, and all upkeep for the whole building. That was a big nut for a small business. If I heard one thing routinely from other Georgetown restaurant owners and landlords, it was that Nathans’ lease was, in a word, outrageous, particularly the amount of the rent. I didn’t need to hear that. I was living it.

A new ten-year lease with the landlords happened at long last after a final bout of back-and-forth between Jake Stein and Dimitri Mallios, but I achieved no breakthroughs. If I wanted a new lease I would have to accept the challenging terms of the old lease. End of discussion. I tried to be positive. While a ten-year lease was less than I wanted, it would have to be enough for me to find a buyer. Most commercial tenants want a lease with a minimum of fifteen to twenty years. A longer lease justifies the capital expense, and the Nathans’ building demanded a lot of expense. If the buyer kept Nathans as Nathans, a renovation was essential. If the buyer were a retail operation, the building would need even more costly work. Regardless, the Halkias family wouldn’t budge beyond ten years.

The day I went to Jake’s office to sign the lease his attitude was that if the old lease was good enough for Howard it ought to be good enough for me. But the truth was the old lease took me like a lamb to slaughter. I stood at Jake’s desk, looking at the one-page “personal guaranty” that he eased toward me. It had a few paragraphs of legalese and a line for my signature. “What’s this?” I asked.

“A personal guaranty. It’s the only way you’ll get this lease,” he said.

“Did Howard sign a guaranty?”

“Yes.”

So I signed it. If I could take back one moment of one day in my ownership of Nathans, this would be the day and the moment. It was dumb of me to sign the guaranty and it showed how I had not learned my lesson; I signed the guaranty the way I had signed our tax returns. I should have asked Jake for a full tutorial on the implications of the document, and asked questions: What does it mean? What are my options? What if I don’t sign? It was a standard component of some leases, and I probably would have had to sign it anyway, but if I’d balked at signing I could have perhaps won some better terms from the landlords. The new lease, of course, meant the same high rent. The landlords were adamant on that score, and I was too naïve at the time to understand words like
leverage
and whether I had any. I did, but I learned of it far too late and by then I’d lost it.

We went back a couple of times to the landlords on the rent matter, but it was like hitting a brick wall. What my lawyers did have me do was to arbitrarily commence a de facto rent decrease. Ironically, it was the landlords’ lawyer, Dimitri Mallios, who suggested I start “shorting” the rent by 30 percent. “They’ll either kick her out or live with it,” he told one of my lawyers in conveying the idea. Though not what I wanted, I could live with eviction, because it would at least be a decisive action. Instead, they didn’t do anything. They lived with it. They cashed the rent checks. However, they also put the 30 percent of rent I didn’t pay into a debt column with my name on it. The reduced rent kept the business alive and viable, but it created a debt pool that dogged and haunted me as it grew month after month, year after year.

B
ECAUSE OF AN
arcane Georgetown ordinance, Nathans’ liquor license didn’t automatically transfer from Howard’s name and corporation to mine. The IRS wouldn’t close the deal until the liquor license was in my name. Just as important, I needed the license to stay open.

The campaign to keep the liquor license took all my time and fell mostly on my shoulders. Something in my life had to give and it was
LKL
. I took a long-term leave of absence from CNN. For a Washington journalist like me, my departure came at the worst possible time. The Monica Lewinsky–President Clinton scandal was breaking. The
whole office dived into the story. I could easily have played a part in it. I’d even gotten close to Monica and had dinner with her and her first lawyer, William Ginsburg, at Nathans. While we ate pasta and chatted I talked Ginsburg into making a live on-air call to Larry, which he did—from my desk in Nathans’ basement. While Ginsburg talked to Larry, Monica looked at my pictures of Spencer and asked if she could write him a letter. On a piece of Nathans stationery she wrote him a note about how cute he was. She dotted the
i
in Monica with a heart.

The quest to get Howard’s liquor license transferred to me was essentially a political campaign, and I enlisted my closest ally, my son, to work it with me. Spencer and I went door to door, asking for signatures from as many Georgetown residents as we could find at home. I did most of the talking, but sometimes he’d just get to the point. “Would you please sign this piece of paper so we can keep my mom’s restaurant?” I appeared before the various neighborhood civic boards to win their support, which wasn’t a given. The board of the old-guard Citizens Association of Georgetown flat-out opposed the license transfer because they felt it would be wrong to allow any loophole in Georgetown’s rigid alcohol law. When I appeared before them, and actually broke down in tears during my plea, one of the male board members said, “If we bend to you what do we do the next time some widow comes in here with a sob story?” Fortunately, that was a minority point of view. The elected members of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, by contrast, voted unanimous support for the transfer. I was there for the vote and thanked each commissioner personally. When the day came for me to testify at the District Building before a critical D.C. city council subcommittee, I was determined to keep my composure. I had to be a warrior and warriors don’t cry. There were no tears.

The lobbying campaign ended up before the full city council, which had to pass special legislation allowing me to have the liquor license. They passed it. The July day the bill was supposed to be signed by the mayor also happened to be the last day of the legislative calendar. If he didn’t sign it that day it might sit there until fall. Miriam said the IRS wouldn’t wait. We risked losing the whole deal if I didn’t get that liquor license transferred now. I jumped in the car and headed for city hall, found the office where the bill sat in a stack of other bills, and
with the clerk’s permission removed it from the stack and walked it to the mayor’s office. I lurked in the waiting room for more than an hour, trying not to pace too much, until his secretary called me in and said, “It’s done. He just signed it.”

I danced a happy dance as I skipped out of city hall, eager to call Miriam with the news.

S
OMEONE ELSE WAITED
for the news, too. Megan Rosenfeld, a reporter for the
Washington Post
, had spent several months working on a profile about me, the IRS, and the liquor license fight. The
Post
didn’t want to run it until the mayor signed the legislation. Nobody had ever written a profile about me. I went along with the idea because I hoped it might help business. I knew the risks. The night the story went to press I was ebullient from getting the mayor’s signature on the bill. A good friend and neighbor, Chris de Paola, stayed up with me to wait for the first edition of the
Post
. We drove across town to the newspaper’s offices and bought a copy so fresh it was still warm. I was too scared to read it. I kept it folded up till we got home and then handed it to Chris. “Here, you read it and let me know.” I watched his face as he read. Finally, he smiled and handed it to me. “It’s safe to read. You’ll be okay.”

WITHOUT RESERVATIONS
was the headline. The story—with a large photo—topped the front page of the Style section. The photo was taken in natural light, with me leaning against a column in the dining room, empty between shifts. I appeared somewhere between forlorn and lost in my dreams. There was a smaller photo, too, of me with Howard in foul-weather gear, snuggling on the deck of a sailboat. The piece dramatically detailed the battle with the IRS, Howard’s shenanigans with taxes, and my struggle to save Nathans. Megan painted me as both dunce and heroine, and Nathans as one of the great Washington saloons. I was relieved the story was sympathetic. She wrote, “It is hard for Carol Ross Joynt to decide which was the worst day of the last 2½ years. There are so many to choose from.” On that, I agreed with her wholeheartedly. It was only the first step in my becoming the public face of Nathans, an unexpected and initially awkward role reversal. I’d always been on the other side, the reporter not the subject. But Nathans had no money for advertising, and even though it was
“legendary,” a “Washington institution,” and one of the city’s “great” saloons, it needed to get back on the radar. Being the brand, being out in the public eye, would be integral to saving the business. Somehow, I would have to be the brand.

M
Y DREAM WAS
to get out of the saloon business. The fact is, however, every battle I won for Nathans more tightly bound me to the place and pushed me further from my goal. After the yearlong ordeal to get the liquor license transferred, Jack Evans, my ward’s city council representative, met me at Nathans for a drink. He was in a celebratory mood, which made sense. Together we’d gone up against the Georgetown old guard and won. But he also had a message. “The community really came out for you, supported you, and that means you can’t just turn around and sell the place. You need to run it, revive it, and make it into the moneymaker you know it can be. I see great things in Nathans’ future.” He was right. A lot of people had got my back because of their love for a rusty old corner pub. Maybe I didn’t want to be in the saloon business, but the community wanted Nathans to be in business. People who were strangers to me were strangers no more. I was beginning to put names to faces, and as I walked around Georgetown I got waves, high fives, and thumbs-up from neighbors, other merchants, and even members of the Citizens Association of Georgetown, who privately told me they never wanted to see Nathans close. This was an awful lot of pressure. I didn’t want to be where I was, but I felt a new sense of gratitude and obligation to my community. Civic affection and support was not something I’d known in journalism, where the job is observation, not participation.

My emotions were in heated conflict, but there was no denying that the campaign to win the liquor license had connected me to Georgetown as never before, and it mattered. I couldn’t tell these people that I wanted to cut and run. I didn’t give up on my quest to unload the business, but I did my best to tamp it down—for a while.

T
HE
W
ASHINGTON
P
OST
’S
restaurant critic, Phyllis Richman, reviewed us in her Sunday column on April 26, 1998. It wasn’t a great
review but it was okay. What was most important to me was that Phyllis Richman had walked in the door in the first place. Simply to be reviewed was a sign we were inching back into the game. The review appeared Sunday, and on Monday we expected a boost in reservations. But the phones broke down and stayed down for three days. Vito Zappala and I were frantic.