For many years I maintained a subscription to Newsweek and National Geographic magazines. Along with a few “women’s journals”, these periodicals kept me informed on matters of apparent importance long before the internet provided us with a running commentary on every aspect of daily life in the global village.
It was my mother-in-law who first got me hooked on my regular fix of global politics and international environmental and cultural issues. Way back in 1982, when she was already 70 years of age, and I a mere boy by comparison, she inaugurated my first Washington Christmas with two annually renewed subscriptions to the world outside the rural estate she called home. It was comfortable in the country, sitting by the fireplace with the snow falling over the river and icicles glistening on the bare branches of the maple, birch and oak trees that grew proudly outside the picture window, and I quietly hoped it would last forever. However, this idealised pax-Americana was an ocean away from my financially deprived culturally rich roots, and light years from my introduction to the bizarre world of door-to-door magazine sales.
Several years earlier I was living in my parents’ house in Philadelphia with my high school sweetheart, studying drama at a private college and generally living high and fast on a small trust fund. It was the beginning of another long, hot, humid East coast summer of barbeques and pool parties, and I was bored. Sitting in the sunny kitchen leafing through the morning paper, I came across an advertisement offering “travel, accommodation, good pay and benefits” for young people who were willing to devote their lives to learning the art of direct sales. I rang the number and spoke to a pleasant woman who arranged an interview at a suite in an upmarket downtown hotel. I arrived and was asked a series of simple questions – mainly with the aim of determining that I was unattached and available to leave within days.
Returning home I told my girlfriend Lara what I was doing, and when I was leaving. Naturally she was upset and confused, but I was sure life on the road was going to be a great adventure. Picked up in a minibus along with several other new recruits we were driven to a motel near a steel town in the industrial heartland of Pennsylvania. Although I was then unaware of it, Lara had also contacted the agency, arranged her own interview, and was already sequestered in one of the girls’ rooms at the motel.
On arrival I was introduced to the ‘sales crew’ and assigned my ‘personal friend’, Todd, who was to teach me the tricks of the trade over the next couple weeks. I shared a room with him and two other guys about the same age. There were a dozen or more rooms occupied by about 40 young people, boys and girls, and half a dozen older ‘team leaders’ responsible for driving us to and from our designated sales areas. There were a few basic rules. Everybody had to chalk up at least one magazine subscription a day – preferably cash in hand, no drugs, alcohol on designated nights out only, and group members stay together at all times – that is; everyone must have their ‘personal friend’ with them always and not associate with ‘outsiders’.
Over the next few days I learned the routine. We got up at 7am, showered and climbed into our team vans to be driven from one small working class town to another to sell magazine subscriptions door to door till about 7pm. We would breakfast and lunch together, and then regroup at the motel in the evening to hand in our takings for the day. There were no days off. We moved from motel to motel every few days as we journeyed the old highway routes from town to town. We carried little pamphlets illustrating the literature we sold and our role as community youth sales experts. We used high-pressure tactics and expected a signature on the dotted line as quickly as possible. There were many doors to knock and always more householders to separate from their cash with our mocking guarantee that their purchase would drop into their mailbox as promised.
It wasn’t long before I realised that the magazines would never arrive for these customers of our insistent fraud. For every 30 dollars of subscriptions in cash we were paid 10 dollars, for check or credit card orders we were given 5 dollars. With the money held in escrow we were paid an allowance at the end of the week. This regime never varied and I quickly got the hang of it. We could do as we liked for dinner and spent the evenings socialising within our sex-segregated groups. Team leaders enforced the lights out curfew at 11pm.
During this time Todd showed me photographs of the exciting places he had been over the past year, including Christmas and New Year at a swank Las Vegas hotel, Easter at the parade in New York and a week on the Florida beaches over the summer. When I asked if he ever saw his family he replied with the same verbatim response as the others I questioned: it’s more fun to be in Vegas with a wad of cash than some dirt-poor town in some obscure part of the country. I began to suspect that none of these other youngsters had any reason to return ‘home’. I had travelled widely before joining this sales sect, but could see the attraction of this on-the-road lifestyle to many a disadvantaged youngster.
Unfortunately, it was also discovered that Lara and I knew each other when I had seen her on the motel parking lot and managed to sneak a quick chat; that was against the rules. She was hurriedly packed and driven from the motel; I was allowed to say a brief goodbye and she told me she was going to her friend Mia’s house.
Saturday nights were why we worked all week. We returned to the motel, settled the accounts and collected our ‘pay’. We were free till noon on Sunday, freedom being the operative word. Everyone would change into their best clothes and meet in the motel car park to decide where to go. The team leaders had already scouted the area to find the local hotspots and would drop us off at various places requested, although being under house rules to stay together we all managed to end up at the same discothèque later in the night – when the boys and girls were allowed to mingle and where the real fun started.
On Saturday night my roommates and I went for a meal and a beer at the local steak house, then made our way to the nightclub. After a couple mixed drinks and a few casual dances I was approached by one of the prettiest girls I had ever seen and asked to slow dance. As we shuffled around the dimly lit boards she put her head on my shoulder and said, “it’s only my second week, but next weekend we can sleep together if you want.” “Yeah, that would be great,” I replied none too convincingly. I sauntered casually and coolly back to the table and not wanting any trouble immediately told my ‘personal friend’ about her suggestion.
Once again Todd spelled out the rules, now that I had encountered a new situation and needed guidance. Boys had to be accompanied by their ‘personal friend’ for the first two weeks and were not allowed to have sex before that introduction time was over, for girls it was three weeks – but then Saturday night sex was positively encouraged. A regular night of drinking and dancing followed by casual sex between group members was seen as a perk of the job. However, relationships were against the rules and couples were not permitted; no one was allowed to have sex with the same partner twice in a month in order to prevent close unions and disruption to the group ethic. The permissive society had strict rules to govern its freedoms.
I was in awe at this unusual revelation, while simultaneously intrigued. As each passing hour unveiled a new experience my free-spirited lifestyle at home began to appear more conservative and traditional than I had previously thought. Back at the motel, Todd and the others paired off with their chosen Saturday night partners and disappeared into the cheap double-bedded rooms. I was left to contemplate the week. I felt homesick; I missed my girlfriend and wanted to see to a familiar friendly face. I wandered outside the parameters of the motel compound and began walking along the stretch of dark, deserted highway trying to regain a piece of seemingly lost sanity.
I spent the next two hours walking the eight miles from the isolated town to Mia’s house in the lovely upper-middle-class suburban estate just north of the Delaware border. It was about four in the morning when I arrived at the sweeping sloped yard which led up to her family’s front door. This was in the days before cell phones and text messages and I did what every teenager would have done, I tossed pebbles from the gravelled driveway at the bedroom window. It wasn’t long before Mia and then Lara peered through the curtains at this lonely boy standing in the back garden as her Romeo beneath the balcony of discontent.
Lara hurriedly dressed and met me outside, where we sat under a leafy elm and talked until the early morning light cast a gallant shadow across the lawn. We were young, foolish, in love and missing each other terribly. We both wanted to go back to my parents’ house and enjoy our usual summer frivolities. We wanted to be together. I rested my aching feet on the cool dewy grass and then began the eight-mile trek back to the motel to return unnoticed at a quiet 8 o’clock on Sunday morning. I packed and left, dropping my magazine sales pamphlet on the dressing table as the others slept. Lara and I went back to our boring but peaceful bliss in the sprawling ‘burbs of the city of brotherly love and rediscovered the happiness of real friendship amongst people we knew and trusted.
My mother-in-law is now 97 years old and patiently lying on her deathbed awaiting a call from her lord – a God she served unfailingly through life and who is now keeping her hanging on through years of slow and painful deterioration. She no longer responds to the warm, loving touch of her family. There have been many changes to my life and the world about us since that late-night far-away proclamation of undying love; some of them I read about over the years as the weekly magazines dropped through the door, others were discovered through personal experience. I have come to realise that however far we travel, love and hope is all we can cling to in times of uncertainty. It has been a long and difficult journey, with many a bump and hill to climb and obstacles to manoeuvre. However, my mother-in-law has reached the end of her road and encountered the final door. For her there is nothing left to buy or sell; she awaits the delivery of her ultimate good news – a hope she subscribed to all her life. I only pray that for this woman who helped educate me into the meaning of home by showing me the world outside, it arrives as promised.
It was my mother-in-law who first got me hooked on my regular fix of global politics and international environmental and cultural issues. Way back in 1982, when she was already 70 years of age, and I a mere boy by comparison, she inaugurated my first Washington Christmas with two annually renewed subscriptions to the world outside the rural estate she called home. It was comfortable in the country, sitting by the fireplace with the snow falling over the river and icicles glistening on the bare branches of the maple, birch and oak trees that grew proudly outside the picture window, and I quietly hoped it would last forever. However, this idealised pax-Americana was an ocean away from my financially deprived culturally rich roots, and light years from my introduction to the bizarre world of door-to-door magazine sales.
Several years earlier I was living in my parents’ house in Philadelphia with my high school sweetheart, studying drama at a private college and generally living high and fast on a small trust fund. It was the beginning of another long, hot, humid East coast summer of barbeques and pool parties, and I was bored. Sitting in the sunny kitchen leafing through the morning paper, I came across an advertisement offering “travel, accommodation, good pay and benefits” for young people who were willing to devote their lives to learning the art of direct sales. I rang the number and spoke to a pleasant woman who arranged an interview at a suite in an upmarket downtown hotel. I arrived and was asked a series of simple questions – mainly with the aim of determining that I was unattached and available to leave within days.
Returning home I told my girlfriend Lara what I was doing, and when I was leaving. Naturally she was upset and confused, but I was sure life on the road was going to be a great adventure. Picked up in a minibus along with several other new recruits we were driven to a motel near a steel town in the industrial heartland of Pennsylvania. Although I was then unaware of it, Lara had also contacted the agency, arranged her own interview, and was already sequestered in one of the girls’ rooms at the motel.
On arrival I was introduced to the ‘sales crew’ and assigned my ‘personal friend’, Todd, who was to teach me the tricks of the trade over the next couple weeks. I shared a room with him and two other guys about the same age. There were a dozen or more rooms occupied by about 40 young people, boys and girls, and half a dozen older ‘team leaders’ responsible for driving us to and from our designated sales areas. There were a few basic rules. Everybody had to chalk up at least one magazine subscription a day – preferably cash in hand, no drugs, alcohol on designated nights out only, and group members stay together at all times – that is; everyone must have their ‘personal friend’ with them always and not associate with ‘outsiders’.
Over the next few days I learned the routine. We got up at 7am, showered and climbed into our team vans to be driven from one small working class town to another to sell magazine subscriptions door to door till about 7pm. We would breakfast and lunch together, and then regroup at the motel in the evening to hand in our takings for the day. There were no days off. We moved from motel to motel every few days as we journeyed the old highway routes from town to town. We carried little pamphlets illustrating the literature we sold and our role as community youth sales experts. We used high-pressure tactics and expected a signature on the dotted line as quickly as possible. There were many doors to knock and always more householders to separate from their cash with our mocking guarantee that their purchase would drop into their mailbox as promised.
It wasn’t long before I realised that the magazines would never arrive for these customers of our insistent fraud. For every 30 dollars of subscriptions in cash we were paid 10 dollars, for check or credit card orders we were given 5 dollars. With the money held in escrow we were paid an allowance at the end of the week. This regime never varied and I quickly got the hang of it. We could do as we liked for dinner and spent the evenings socialising within our sex-segregated groups. Team leaders enforced the lights out curfew at 11pm.
During this time Todd showed me photographs of the exciting places he had been over the past year, including Christmas and New Year at a swank Las Vegas hotel, Easter at the parade in New York and a week on the Florida beaches over the summer. When I asked if he ever saw his family he replied with the same verbatim response as the others I questioned: it’s more fun to be in Vegas with a wad of cash than some dirt-poor town in some obscure part of the country. I began to suspect that none of these other youngsters had any reason to return ‘home’. I had travelled widely before joining this sales sect, but could see the attraction of this on-the-road lifestyle to many a disadvantaged youngster.
Unfortunately, it was also discovered that Lara and I knew each other when I had seen her on the motel parking lot and managed to sneak a quick chat; that was against the rules. She was hurriedly packed and driven from the motel; I was allowed to say a brief goodbye and she told me she was going to her friend Mia’s house.
Saturday nights were why we worked all week. We returned to the motel, settled the accounts and collected our ‘pay’. We were free till noon on Sunday, freedom being the operative word. Everyone would change into their best clothes and meet in the motel car park to decide where to go. The team leaders had already scouted the area to find the local hotspots and would drop us off at various places requested, although being under house rules to stay together we all managed to end up at the same discothèque later in the night – when the boys and girls were allowed to mingle and where the real fun started.
On Saturday night my roommates and I went for a meal and a beer at the local steak house, then made our way to the nightclub. After a couple mixed drinks and a few casual dances I was approached by one of the prettiest girls I had ever seen and asked to slow dance. As we shuffled around the dimly lit boards she put her head on my shoulder and said, “it’s only my second week, but next weekend we can sleep together if you want.” “Yeah, that would be great,” I replied none too convincingly. I sauntered casually and coolly back to the table and not wanting any trouble immediately told my ‘personal friend’ about her suggestion.
Once again Todd spelled out the rules, now that I had encountered a new situation and needed guidance. Boys had to be accompanied by their ‘personal friend’ for the first two weeks and were not allowed to have sex before that introduction time was over, for girls it was three weeks – but then Saturday night sex was positively encouraged. A regular night of drinking and dancing followed by casual sex between group members was seen as a perk of the job. However, relationships were against the rules and couples were not permitted; no one was allowed to have sex with the same partner twice in a month in order to prevent close unions and disruption to the group ethic. The permissive society had strict rules to govern its freedoms.
I was in awe at this unusual revelation, while simultaneously intrigued. As each passing hour unveiled a new experience my free-spirited lifestyle at home began to appear more conservative and traditional than I had previously thought. Back at the motel, Todd and the others paired off with their chosen Saturday night partners and disappeared into the cheap double-bedded rooms. I was left to contemplate the week. I felt homesick; I missed my girlfriend and wanted to see to a familiar friendly face. I wandered outside the parameters of the motel compound and began walking along the stretch of dark, deserted highway trying to regain a piece of seemingly lost sanity.
I spent the next two hours walking the eight miles from the isolated town to Mia’s house in the lovely upper-middle-class suburban estate just north of the Delaware border. It was about four in the morning when I arrived at the sweeping sloped yard which led up to her family’s front door. This was in the days before cell phones and text messages and I did what every teenager would have done, I tossed pebbles from the gravelled driveway at the bedroom window. It wasn’t long before Mia and then Lara peered through the curtains at this lonely boy standing in the back garden as her Romeo beneath the balcony of discontent.
Lara hurriedly dressed and met me outside, where we sat under a leafy elm and talked until the early morning light cast a gallant shadow across the lawn. We were young, foolish, in love and missing each other terribly. We both wanted to go back to my parents’ house and enjoy our usual summer frivolities. We wanted to be together. I rested my aching feet on the cool dewy grass and then began the eight-mile trek back to the motel to return unnoticed at a quiet 8 o’clock on Sunday morning. I packed and left, dropping my magazine sales pamphlet on the dressing table as the others slept. Lara and I went back to our boring but peaceful bliss in the sprawling ‘burbs of the city of brotherly love and rediscovered the happiness of real friendship amongst people we knew and trusted.
My mother-in-law is now 97 years old and patiently lying on her deathbed awaiting a call from her lord – a God she served unfailingly through life and who is now keeping her hanging on through years of slow and painful deterioration. She no longer responds to the warm, loving touch of her family. There have been many changes to my life and the world about us since that late-night far-away proclamation of undying love; some of them I read about over the years as the weekly magazines dropped through the door, others were discovered through personal experience. I have come to realise that however far we travel, love and hope is all we can cling to in times of uncertainty. It has been a long and difficult journey, with many a bump and hill to climb and obstacles to manoeuvre. However, my mother-in-law has reached the end of her road and encountered the final door. For her there is nothing left to buy or sell; she awaits the delivery of her ultimate good news – a hope she subscribed to all her life. I only pray that for this woman who helped educate me into the meaning of home by showing me the world outside, it arrives as promised.
2 comments:
Yes, there is truth in this tale and it contains many mixed emotions for me as well. I received a comment on this story from a friend I hadn't heard from for many years - she remembered when this actually happened, so it touched a lot of people .. and I'm glad .. Thanks for your comment .. KW
Post a Comment