Heading into the office on a grey and overcast December day, I felt groggy and out of focus. The company holiday party the night before had left me with almost a vacant or numb feeling, and as I drove into the parking lot, I knew last night’s final snifter of cognac was going to make the day a challenge.
I worked at Beitzell, a 100 year old wine and spirits company that marketed and sold an exclusive list of brands to Washington, D.C.’s hotels, restaurants, bars, and liquor stores. It was my first real “corporate” job after many years of working in the hospitality industry. Being that I was a former restaurant owner, Beitzell hired me on as a Marketing Manager to create promotions and programs that would help our hotel and restaurant customers sell more of the products they bought from us. It was a perfect job for me, and I loved it.
I had been in the job for about a year, and the night before at the end of year party, the president had called me up to the front of the room. He told everyone that he was very pleased with my efforts and that he was promoting me to take over the restaurant sales team. Everyone congratulated me and we celebrated late into the night.
The next morning after pulling into a parking space in the company lot, I sat for a few minutes thinking about what was about to change. I loved marketing and had always viewed sales as something less exciting. In one of my attempts to move on from the late nights of hospitality, I had taken a job with Pennsylvania Life Insurance, selling policy’s door to door.
It was a crazy difficult job that entailed talking your way into a complete stranger’s home, sitting at the kitchen table to convince them they had to buy it, and hopefully walking out the door with a check for $200 (money they usually needed to live on). We trained every day learning all the tricks to coax and cajole and make a sale, and I was pretty good at, selling 4-5 policies every week. It was terrible making a living off of low-income folks who had no other insurance options, and after several months my heart couldn't take it anymore and I quit, but I learned a ton. It also left me with a really bad idea of sales, and now at Beitzell, I was going to be managing a team of salespeople.
The promotion was a total surprise, and it came with an office, daily lunch in the executive dining room, a company car, and a significant raise in salary. As I walked into the building, I thought it wasn’t what I would have asked for, but I could do it. I knew the salespeople and we had worked great together. This could work, and I had better not screw it up.
When I got to my new desk there was a note to see the VP of Sales when I arrived. After grabbing a tall glass of water, I went to see Sal. He was an old liquor guy that had worked for the company for 40 years. Sal was also a character. Even though it was the mid-1980’s, he wore polaroid sunglasses all the time, leisure suits with several neck chains that hung down to an open collar shirt with too much salt and pepper chest hair sticking out. His head was half bald and what was left he combed straight back in long strands that reached shoulder length. A mustache and goatee finished off his look. I wasn’t sure, but I guessed he was the guy that drove the Trans-Am out in the parking lot.
I had not interacted with Sal at all except saying hello as we passed in the hall. When I poked my head in his office, he was on the phone and he pointed to a chair directing me to sit down. After hanging up, Sal spent the next hour or so telling me how horrible the restaurant team salespeople were and what I needed to do to whip them into shape. It was a very one-sided meeting and after he talked himself out, he handed me a slip of paper. He told me a call had been routed to him from the Commissary Manager at Bolling Airforce Base who gave him an order for a case of cheap house wine for the officers Holiday Party. Sal asked when he had last seen a salesperson and the manager had told him he had never seen one, but it was hard to get on the base and he rarely needed anything. Sal demanded that I do something to fix this and do it today. I hadn't even thought we sold to military bases, but either way, it was a nice start to my first day as Sales Manager.
As I headed back to my office, it seemed pretty obvious that Sal was "marking his territory with some yellow snow," and he was using the Bolling example as a way to break in a new sales manager. When I got back to my desk, I looked up what kind of account Bolling was and found that they bought just a few cases of $40 wine a year. Nevertheless, it was my first day and I wanted to make a good impression, so I paged our salesperson who worked in Southeast DC to see if she could squeeze in a visit to the base.
After a few minutes, she called. After a few pleasantries and jokes about who drank too much at the Holiday Party, I explained what I needed. She laughed her head off and told me to go back into Sal’s office and tell him to go “F” himself. There was no way that she was going to drive all the way out there while she needed to be selling the key restaurants in her territory in the city that had tons of business. She sweetly wished me luck and quickly hung up.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to do what she suggested, but she wasn’t wrong. It was December, by far our biggest month of the year and it was ridiculous to pull her out of her territory to appease a request from Sal. I didn’t report to him, but he approved all the special deals we would need to beat our competitors, so I needed to do something. If I had been in the job even 3-4 months, I may have given lip service to his request and gone about the day as planned, but being new I hadn’t built up any credibility in the job.
As I sat there, it occurred to me that I could probably get one of the salespeople to run out there, but it would certainly hurt their sales for that day. The only solution was for me to go myself. I doubt that Sal was looking for me to do this, but it was the only way to make it happen.
I spent the rest of the morning reviewing past sales, division revenue, our largest accounts, and the sales territories. I skipped lunch in the Exec Dining Room so I wouldn’t have to answer to Sal, and took out my surface map of D.C. to actually see how to get to Bolling Air Force base. It was located on the border of Virginia on the south side of the Potomac River. The U.S. government had a sliver of land over there and had built Bolling right after World War I where mostly test pilots used it on new aircraft. It was a small base by the 1980s and had been usurped in importance by the much larger Andrews Air Force base where President Reagan’s Airforce One was stationed.
Having somewhat mapped the route, I took a few calls from some of the hotels I had marketing programs with and by mid-afternoon headed out to Bolling. The route took me from our offices in Northeast DC to Southeast DC, and the traffic getting around the Mall and Capital was horrendous. By the time I got to the I-295 interchange to head out of downtown, it was almost 3 PM and I was crawling in stop and go traffic with little headway being made. I opened my D.C. map on the passenger seat and realized that if I could get over to the Suitland Parkway, I could get off at MLK Blvd and take surface streets over to Bolling. I had to cross five lanes of barely moving cars, but after a while, I made it to the Suitland exit ramp. Then things got pretty weird.
After driving about a half-mile on the Suitland Parkway, I noticed that there was no traffic behind me. I don’t mean there was no traffic jam, there was no traffic or cars at all. Looking ahead there were no cars ahead of me either and after two delivery trucks passed me heading into the city, there were no cars or trucks in the oncoming lane either. Just when it started to seem apocalyptic, I noticed flashing lights in my rearview mirror coming on fast. There were two unmarked cars, and they blew by me going 100 miles an hour or more and were soon out of view.
I kept going but slowed down a bit wondering what was happening. The Suitland Parkway at what was just after 4 PM should be a parking lot. It was as if I was driving at 4 AM instead. A minute or so later, another flashing light lit up my rearview. This one was going fast also, but as the unmarked car approached it slowed down and cut in front of me. I heard a loudspeaker say, “Pull over to the side of the road now,” with emphasis on the word now. I immediately pulled over.
I huge man, maybe six foot five and 250 pounds got out of the driver’s side of the car and started walking toward me. Another smaller guy got out of the passenger side, and he had what looked like a gym bag with his right hand stuffed into the top like he was holding something he didn’t want others to see.
The huge guy walked over and motioned for me to roll down my window, and as he approached he asked what I was doing on this road. I told him I was heading out to Bolling Air Force Base and said I was going to meet with the Commissary Manager about a wine order. I reached into my suit pocket and gave him a business card.
He wasn’t friendly at all and gruffly asked me if I had a camera which I told him I didn’t. He looked at me for a full 20 seconds or so staring into my eyes. I didn’t look away, but it was pretty intense. I could tell this guy was Secret Service or some special ops type. I had worked briefly on Capitol Hill and when any of the cabinet officers came for a visit, guys like this with wires coming out of their ears were always nearby. After our staring session, he ordered me to stay inside my car and not move my car until I was told to. I said O.K.
He and his buddy got back in their car and motored off. While I waited, I turned on the car radio to listen to some tunes. I realized that with everything that happened in the last day that I hadn’t listened to the news at all. The classic rock station I tuned in began playing the Beatles, “Back in the USSR.” As the song started out, I could see a half-mile ahead on the inbound lane some activity. As the traffic approached, from a distance I noticed that all the cars were black, and I began wondering who had died.
As the Beatles sang their Russian anthem, the cars approached, and they were nothing like I had ever seen before. With my window rolled down it was incredibly spooky as there was no sound but tires on the pavement and the whooshing sound as each passed in procession. There were a lot of them. They were clearly limousines from what was possibly an Eastern European or even Soviet Block country. There were dozens of them passing one after another, about 100 feet apart and going slowly at what seemed like 30 miles per hour or so.
These limos were exactly the same all black, with black tinted windows, and were angry looking. They gave off an aura that said, "don't mess with me." The moment was surreal, as I sat by the side of the road with no one else in view besides these foreign beasts on parade. The slate gray December sky made the sight even more chilling and ominous. It finally dawned on me that I was witnessing the USSR leader, Gorbachev, heading into D.C. for his first-ever Summit with Reagan. It had been all over the news for the last week and I had forgotten all about it.
The procession went on for several minutes and I stopped counting at 25 cars, so there may have been over 60 or more. Except for the driver, there was no way someone was in each limo and I figured it was a security thing to keep anyone looking to harm Gorbachev from guessing which car he was riding in. After the last car went by, I sat there for like 20 minutes. I switched around the dial to see if there was any Gorby news and I heard this:
“For security reasons, Gorbachev's route into D.C. for the upcoming summit with President Reagan had been kept secret. Once his plane landed late Monday afternoon at Andrews Air Force base, his motorcade had been expected to depart through the base's main gate through Morningside, VA. However, by going out the north gate, the Soviet leader and his traveling party took a straight shot down the Suitland Parkway and into the city.”
Hearing this, I figured that I must have slipped past the Secret Service and onto the Parkway just after they were closing the road for Gorbachev’s parade of thug vehicles and I got stuck in the middle of it. The radio station continued to play songs in honor of the occasion and after a while, it was obvious that with the parade over, no one was coming back for me.
I pulled out onto the road, drove to the next exit, and turned around heading back to the city. Bolling was going to have to wait, I needed a drink.