You don't need to do all that. Just run emacsclient with `emacsclient -a ""`.

From the man page:

    -a, --alternate-editor=COMMAND
           If  the  Emacs  server  is  not  running, run the specified shell command instead.  This can also be specified via the ALTERNATE_EDITOR environment variable.  If the value of ALTERNATE_EDITOR is the empty string, run
           "emacs --daemon" to start Emacs in daemon mode, and try to connect to it.