Francisco

On a summer day in 1980 while driving back to the office in my fifteen year old TR6, a British sports car, I realized no one taught me anything about any of this.

As a 25-year-old CPA working in Chicago, I thought I had the ticket to a happy life – work hard, become a partner, run the table for the next forty years, and retire with a smattering of grandchildren, a vacation home and a nice bit of savings.

It had started well. After college, I signed on with a two partner CPA firm because I lacked the confidence to join the big shops. The partners were Sicilians from an old neighborhood that was wiped out in the early 1960’s when Mayor Daley bulldozed their homes and stores to build the University of Illinois Chicago campus. The residents fled to the suburbs and the area became a war zone.

We did certified audits, prepared taxes, dabbled in forensic accounting, and helped small businesses. The partners and managers liked my work. My co-workers respected me; although they considered me weird because I read too much.

As the years slid by, my confidence grew, and the promotions came ahead of schedule.

Then I got a new client – a startup business called Mexican American Railroad Contractors.

The owner was a fifty-five-year-old immigrant named Francisco. In the early 1940’s he crossed the Rio Grande by himself as a teenager. For the last three decades, he worked on train tracks owned by the steel mills on the southeast side of Chicago and in northwest Indiana.

In those years, the US manufacturers ran at maximum capacity to meet the needs of the booming post-war economy. They received raw materials and shipped the new steel by train. Hundreds of miles of track ran throughout the region. If a siding went out of line and became incapacitated, an entire operation would have to shut down. Getting the track fixed was beyond important; stopping a blast furnace that ran 24/7 would cost thousands and thousands and more thousands of dollars.

Francisco had worked for the mills maintaining and repairing track to keep things humming along. He started as a laborer and became a supervisor.

He founded a business that offered plant managers a crew of experienced non union laborers on an emergency basis. When a track went bad, they called Francisco. He responded in less than two hours to literally straighten things out. This was a twenty-four hour a day seven day a week service.

Francisco and his guys fixed the tracks, and I did everything else – including setting up his books, registering him with the taxing authorities, getting him incorporated, obtaining a bank account, negotiating insurance and all the other minute details of opening a new business. I had a “certain set of skills.”

I enjoyed working with him. It was different from all my other clients and I wanted to help Francisco achieve the American dream.

We met every Friday at the worldwide corporate headquarters of Mexican American Railroad Contractors, the backroom of a bar owned by his wife, an Irish woman named Peggy. Her rundown tavern was on Ashland Avenue south of Pershing Road. When prohibition ended in 1933 over 5,000 bars opened in Chicago. Ashland between Pershing and 47th street was called Whiskey Row because it had tavern after tavern that catered to the employees of the Union Stockyards. When the stockyards closed in the late 1950’s almost all the bars closed too. Peggy owned a decrepit survivor, the last of its species.

We sat at an old wooden table in the back of the bar. While I paid his bills and updated the books, Francisco drank and told me about his life and the jobs he had completed in the last week. He signed any documents I brought, such as tax returns. The last task was paying the workers. He gave me the timecards. I computed the amount due and wrote the checks, and Francisco signed them.

The laborers, around fifteen Hispanic men from eighteen to over sixty years old, gathered in their faded jeans, plaid shirts, and leather vests. Some wore cowboy hats and boots. The younger guys had smooth faces, mustaches, and black hair fashioned in the latest style (think disco). The older men’s faces had prominent gold dental work, broken noses, scars, and deep wrinkles born from the years spent toiling outdoors.

They were hardened and rail thin men who performed miracles wrestling the train track back into place with shovels, picks, sledgehammers, steel rods and muscle. Francisco did not have any power equipment; everything was done with technology that dated back to a time before the birth of Christ.

As Francisco handed out the checks, some guys nodded at me with a smile. Others ignored or glared at me. They saw a twenty-five-year-old white guy who grew up in the suburbs – a doughy assed kid wearing a three-piece suit who drove a British sports car. They imagined this privileged SOB had never done a hard day’s work in his life and controlled their money to an extent. They did not appreciate the mountains I had climbed to achieve my success.

Some men pocketed their checks and left. Most went right to Peggy. She cashed their checks and turned the hard-earned dollars into beer and tequila.

AsI left with my briefcase and calculator the jukebox blasted out Tex-Mex ballads, the men shouted at each other in a language I did not understand, and Francisco was well on his way to drunk-town.

Every Friday, Francisco, his guys, and I performed the same ballet.

We bonded.

The business prospered for the first few months. Francisco had the golden ticket. There was plenty of work, the mills paid on time, and the cash flowed in like a happy little river.

Then success bit Francisco’s butt.

He started making bad decisions like buying a new pickup truck, hiring friends who could not get the job done, and mistreating his most valuable team members. Over time the workers quit, and the mills stopped calling.

The Friday afternoon performance devolved into a tragedy. Francisco was often drunk when I walked in. He could not cover his expenses, including my bill. The Sicilians pressured me to collect their money.

The last day I walked into Peggy’s bar it was empty, she had a massive black eye and Francisco was passed out at our table in the backroom.

I looked at her and said, “I’ll call him on Monday.”

She said, “Please no. Talk to him now. Please. You gotta.”

I sat at our table and shook Francisco’s shoulder. His head remained planted on the table. He had not washed in a few days and smelled a little overripe. I shook harder and said his name. Eventually he turned his head and looked up at me. He struggled to sit up and said, “Antonio.” This was the first time he had said my name in his own language.

I used all the Spanish I knew and said, “Senor Francisco, como estas?”

He began to weep and talked to me in his native tongue for the next fifteen minutes. The best I could tell he had given up. Self-pity flowed out of him as he blamed himself for everything.

I just kept saying it would be ok like a soldier comforting his dying comrade.

Peggy brought both of us a beer, the first drink I ever had in her bar.

Eventually he put his head back on the table and started snoring.

I said goodbye to Peggy for the last time.

On that drive back to the office, I realized I could not handle the human challenges arising from Francisco’s situation.  I was not a therapist.  The damn accounting professors did not teach me the emotional and psychological side of business management. There should have been a seminar on how to deal with a blackout drunk and failing entrepreneurs in the back of a bar on Ashland Avenue.