The American Dream

September marked my grand return to the States, after a year in England completing a master’s degree at the University of Manchester. With good planning and good fortune, I completed the dissertation early and spent the last three months on my visa burning through my university stipend, gallivanting around Europe, like a poor man’s James Cook.

Flying from city to city had been relentless fun. Slothing through the streets during the day, drinking all night. Wash, rinse, repeat. Every last cent counted tenfold.

Alas, reality came knocking: my visa expired, the money ran out, and it was back to New York.

That was when Heather Lynn, my college girlfriend, re-entered the picture. Word got around that I was back in the States and she gave me a shout. In college, we had lived on the same street, but after graduation I was off to England for grad school—and she took a full-time job in the City. It was lovely to know she still cared, but it was not without consternation. Things were rocky when I left—and while the advent of modern technology allowed us to keep in touch for the first few months, communication was strained, until it was completely nonexistent. An ocean will put real distance in the relationship.

Besides, there were more pressing concerns, like landing a job—and fast. The clock was ticking.

As luck would have it, Jeff Johnson, a teammate from my college basketball days was working at Power Processing, a behemoth of a payroll software company. They would hire anyone in sales, especially former athletes. It was a grind, he explained, but if you could hack it there—it was good money. I didn’t have many options either, so I figured I’d at least check it out. What was the worst thing that could happen? Quitting was a conversation and handshake away.

I called Jim, my cousin by marriage, who worked for Power Processing in its Manhattan office—and he arranged an interview. The next thing that I knew, I was dressed in a shirt and tie, calling business after business, setting appointments for a rep from the company to sell them payroll. It was easy enough—prove myself on the phones—and I’d be given my own territory and start earning commission. Reps started with one zip code, but if they sold enough, management would expand their opportunity. My first real job. What a gig.

The second week on the job, my sales team cut out early to have a few beers and bowl. There were seven of us sales reps: Patrick Chino, Sydney Aphra, Sean Caffle, Tina Aguilar, Jack Jones, Matt Palin, and me, Louis Hawthorne.

Sydney went by her last name, Aphra. It suited her. Aphra. Everyone at the office loved her. She was aloof and mysterious. Cut from a different cloth than the rest of cardboard cutouts in our office. A modern take on Woodstock.

There was a perplexing look in her eye. Not absence, but something wasn’t all there. Either way, every time we brushed past each other, to and from the lane, I couldn’t help but wonder.

We got to talking. She went on and on, but not in the way salespeople usually do. No posturing. No empty work gossip. She spoke with you, not at you. It turned out she grew up a couple of towns over from me, but when we started to meander towards the “Do you know so-and-so?” conversation, she made a quick left turn. “Lou,” she started, looking up at me with a toothless grin, “I really don’t care who you know from my hometown.”

“Don’t I know the feeling,” I said. “You are my hero. That mindless chatter is a waste.”

“Oh my god… I know!” She said, slurring a little. “Why don’t you give me a ride home and we can continue to not talk about it?”

Grinning, I obliged. Who was I to say no?

She walked back toward the old machine that spits out the bowling balls. It creaked along, bowling ball in and bowling ball out. Another victim of the 9 to 5.

Two hours of bowling was plenty. We squared up the bar tab, bid the team farewell, and walked out to the car.

She grabbed my phone off the dash and asked if she could put on her music. Aphra cranked up the volume and some hippie-EDM-love child blared through the speakers. I did not care for it. Ears ringing, I looked down at the nav, hoping we were close. Three minutes. Okay, I thought. I can take three more minutes of this.

We pulled into her neighborhood and she cut the music abruptly. I wondered if I had subconsciously complained aloud.

She turned toward me, “So…”

I raised my brow, listening intently.

“What would you say, if I said I wanted you to come inside with me?”

“I’d say…. ‘I don’t know how good of an idea that is.’” I replied.

“What?”

“Look, I’ve just started this job and I don’t—” She twisted the volume all the up, louder than it was the first time. We continued through the suburban neighborhood. She sang along wildly, hanging her head out the window now, hair blowing in the breeze.

The nav pinged. We had arrived at her home.

She turned the music down, grabbed my face and turned it towards her, staring me dead in the eyes. “So, do you want to come in or what?”

I laughed to myself awkwardly. I didn’t embarrass easily but prioritizing my entry-level sales job had me flushed.

“Would that I could, but I really don’t think it’s the best idea. I’m not sure that would be super professional of me.”

“Wow.” She responded, despondent.

“Listen, it’s not you… And I’m sure I’ll want to off myself in the morning for this… But one day we will revisit this. I’m sure of it. Really, I am.”

“I can’t believe you’re not into this.”

“It’s not th—” She cut me off again. “Don’t worry about it, Lou. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, as she got out in a huff and marched inside.

I drove home puzzled, eventually regretting my decision.

Five more weeks of calling on businesses, then it was time to present my case for employment to the managers.

10 minutes in a suit and tie, doing the monkey dance in front of a tacky PowerPoint presentation—and there I was! A payroll salesman! How divine!

Jeff and I moved into a house with his older brother, Henry. The top floor of a two-family, a block from the ocean. Life was okay. The job started off easy enough. I reported to the office each morning, just like the training period. Except Aphra wouldn’t speak to me.

After that first night out, I kept expecting her, or one of the other young beautiful salesgirls the company loved to employ to invite me home. But they didn’t.

The days in the office were mindless. Make some calls, then hit my territory to go door-to-door.

After beginner’s luck handed me a couple of quick sales, I started to get comfortable there. I barely even wore a tie anymore. That was the culture at Power Processing, bring in revenue and management would loosen the reins. Tenured reps came into the office at their own leisure. If it was raining or hot—or remotely near a holiday, they were ghosts.

It was smooth sailing until I ramped up to a full quota and going through the motions was no longer an option. My ‘number’ was allocated to a sales manager who directly oversaw my performance. Mine was a large Samoan-looking-man named George. He stood a few inches taller than me and was wide as a fridge. It turned out he wasn’t Samoan at all, but Hispanic.

Anyway, when I got there, the team needed help badly. Sales were down—and the Vice President of the company had us reporting to the office a full hour earlier. 8 a.m. Uncivil.

Somehow, it seemed I was the only one who found this ridiculous, sitting in the office cold-calling businesses that had hardly opened for the day, digging and clawing to contact an actual business owner.

Prospect lists were Sisyphean. Account after account, printed out on thinly spaced spreadsheets, with the business’ name, contact, address, and phone number. All the information you need to harass someone, with “professional persistence,” as the higher-ups referred to it.

Every call was different. There were the secretaries bored out of their skulls who just wanted someone to talk to. Oh, and the failed business owners, who couldn’t understand how it was possible that people were still calling on a business that had been defunct for years.

Sometimes, it was the contact, not the business that was dead.

It didn’t matter how miserable it was—there was no excuse not to be dialing, going door-to-door, and most importantly closing deals. That was the job.

The meetings were even worse. It pains me to admit it, but when I was first training for the role, I actually liked them. At least it was a break from monotonous dialing and the endless regurgitation of corporate talk tracks and disingenuous greetings: “Hi! This is Louis from Power Processing!!!!”

But once I became full-time, the meetings became the most insufferable part of each week. They made getting cursed out of a store-front look like a stroll through the Boston Commons. Not because the meetings were particularly challenging or stressful or intricate… Or anything specific, really. But rather, because they were nothing. Utterly nothing. Merely an initiative started by corporate to cultivate the mirage of structure and purpose for the sales reps.

Every week we reviewed countless documents. Competitive intelligence, selling strategies, product rollouts, forecast calls. You name it. Anything to further the notion that this was a career, not a job. A career.

Meetings were a special kind of hell, I’ll tell you. No productivity or freedom. People reduced to wallflowers, sitting in a dingy conference room talking much about nothing. The content was numbingly irrelevant—but what made matters worse was the submissive nature of the other sales reps that allowed them to happen. It was shameful.

All of them, walking around, smiling, offering up nothing but “please sir, may I have anotha,” while the company patronized them and extracted their souls for cold hard cash. How grown adults could allow talking heads to demean them this way was beyond me.

Management was no better, in fact, they themselves were entirely useless, blinded by the corporate lights.

My England days consumed my every thought. The owner at Dice, a local bar I frequented, took a liking to me and offered me a job if I didn’t want to go back to New York. All cash, off the books. We’d figure out the visa situation eventually, she told me.

Instead, I hopped on the merry-go-round of life like a buffoon! Surely, they didn’t hold such ridiculous meetings at Dice. And if they did, at least they knew how to pour a cocktail.

George approached me at the end of the day and asked why I hadn’t logged my activity for the week in our CRM system. I looked at him puzzled and explained that I had already booked all the appointments I went on. He glared at me contemptuously and explained that due to a “corporate activity initiative” reps had to log fake appointments if they didn't hit the corporate metrics: 25 with “center of influences” and seven with sales prospects.

I contested the issue and he became enraged, shouting that it was an order from corporate and my failure to do so reflected poorly on him, shouting that “He’d be damned if I wasn’t going to suck it up and log some bullshit activity.” I rambled on for a couple of minutes about the moral dilemma he was putting me in, half out of laziness and half out of principle. He cut me off and started to mock me, “C’mon ‘Corporate Lou,’ cut the shit. You gotta do it”.

Once more, I pushed back and finally he told me there were two options, either log the damned activity or email the Divisional Vice President and share my thoughts with him directly.

I shackled myself to the desk and 1,500 words spilled furiously out of my fingertips. “And I’ll tell you what Mr. Divisional Vice President, you are setting the company up to fucking fail. Do you even understand the dangers you are exposing us to?! How much do you think your equity will be worth when it all comes crashing down?!”

Line after line it went on, berating the loathsome suit, I was going to show him!

After proofreading my masterpiece, I looked up at the time. It was 6:25 p.m., 55 minutes past closing, and I felt stupid staring down the send button. There was the new house by the beach I was renting with Jeff and Henry and my shiny new Toyota Camry, the American Dream on wheels… Without a job those expenses would put me six feet under in no time.

Click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click… click…

The backspace key taunted me, as I nicked away at my baby, one letter at a time. When it was all said and done, one soul deprived line—now addressed to George—stared back at my expressionless mug:

“I finished logging my activity. See you tomorrow.”

How pathetic, I thought, dragging my feet out of the office.

After a bout with rush hour traffic, I landed on my bed in a heap, grabbed the silver carrying case from my nightstand and chased down two sleeping pills. It was the sort of day that deserved liquor, but this was a means to an end too. I’d be dead asleep by 8 p.m., free from thoughts of payroll, monotonous meetings, and anything associated with my new life. Gospel.

The next morning, I pulled up to the office at 7:45. It was a ghost town. Most of the reps didn’t file in until right at 8 and the managers, well, 9 o’ clock if conditions were perfect.

George sauntered over to my desk, grinning smugly. “Good morning, Hawthorne. Any more crusades today? How’d he like your email?” He asked, knowing full-well it had been aborted.

I rolled over and let him pet my belly, “No… no… I live for compliance.” He laughed and walked back to his desk.

I was disgusted. Mostly with myself.