The Flyer That Changed Everything ~ A Story from My Past

I remember passing it on a telephone pole – a flyer that said, “Make thousands of dollars this summer, travel across the country, and have lots of fun.”

I was in my second year of college and I’ve always been up for an adventure, so this got my curiosity going. I showed up at the meeting advertised on the flyer, thinking that gobs of people would be there too, considering there were 18,000 students on campus. There were about 10 of us. I’m not one to dismiss something based on assumptions of the masses; I was still very intrigued.

The person running the meeting was also a college student. Jason. He was nice looking, blond, tan, energetic, and had a kind disposition. He wasn’t salesman-y as he proceeded to describe what this mysterious job entailed…

We would carpool across the country to Nashville, Tennessee, with other students from UCSB and other colleges in California who decided to go for it and had reliable cars they were willing to drive. Once there, we would spend one week on the grounds of a publishing company while attending sales school all day, each day. Sales school is where we would learn how to go door-to-door, selling condensed encyclopedias called The Volume Library, memorizing 6 pages of script to the point that we sounded natural. The first page of script was the basic spiel and the other pages were the options we’d have to quickly pick based on the types of responses people had to us standing at their doorstep.

At this point in the meeting, some people’s facial expressions showed that they were out. I was in. I loved this kind of unpredictable, variable, adventurous stuff. As Jason explained on and answered questions all over the map, we learned that after the sales school in Nashville, we would each be assigned a little town in an East Coast state. We would also be put in assigned groupings of girls and guys to travel there and spend the summer with. Where would we stay as a home base in between the little towns our group was assigned? We would go door-to-door to find someone willing to open their home to us for the whole summer. No way! The craziness of it was just too cool. I didn’t have to think long about it. I signed up.

How long would we do it each day? Why did we have to go across the country? What would we live off of in the meantime? Well, as those of us who went for it found out once in Nashville, we were to do every single thing each day in a rigid routine in order to guarantee success. The company had learned over time that those who were most disciplined and predictable with their time each day did the best. We were to wake up at the same time every morning, take shifts of brushing teeth, going to the bathroom, taking a cold shower, and preparing two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for each other – one each for lunch, one each for dinner. We were to be out of the house immediately, rarely to even be seen by the kind people allowing us their room, and headed to a local diner to spend no more than a few dollars every day on coffee and a bagel for breakfast. Then we were to leave, do an encouraging cheer together in the parking lot, and each of us be dropped off in our nearby town by the one of us who had a car.

We were to go door-to-door for 13 1/2 hours a day, 6 days a week. We were far away from home so that when we felt rejected, weary, and over it, we couldn’t just catch a quick ride home and do something else for the summer. And we were to spend so little of our own money on food for the summer that expenses would be negligible until we received what we earned at the end.

I was assigned to be with two girls from a different college whom I hadn’t spent more than a minute with while in sales school. I had driven across the country with four other girls from UCSB, and we had all bonded. The publishing company separated me from them for numbers’ sake and I quickly found that these two girls I didn’t know were very exclusive, petty, and difficult to be with.

The three of us drove into Summit, New Jersey, and parked in a grocery store lot to prepare our minds for the task of asking people if we could live in their house for three months. At that point, I was quickly losing my adventurous spirit. I missed the girls I had bonded with on the way to sales school. We laughed all the time, we were genuine with each other, and we had built such good rapport over those thousands of miles of driving. These heartless, humorless girls were changing my whole outlook for the summer. I knew that with them, I would essentially go through this experience alone. Each of us was prepared to be physically alone all day, every day as we walked one street after another until dark. But being emotionally alone at the end of the day was a game changer. It would be grueling rather than adventurous. Lonely rather than challenging.

I started feeling a sense of deep sorrow. I began developing a rash all over. I remember calling my parents from a phone booth for the first time since leaving California, bawling a river of tears, and aching to be home. I knew I had to do something to change things right away. I called a number and left a message for Jason, who was now my supervisor. He was in a town he’d been assigned to, going door-to-door as well to find a house with his group of guys. I told him I knew it sounded like too much, but I wanted to be reassigned so that I could be back with the girls I’d bonded with. He contacted me hours later and told me the company okayed it. The girls I was with drove me to a place where we met with the other four girls and handed me off. I was welcomed heartily and felt elated. Now I could get to work.

We immediately separated into two groups and set out knocking on doors. We used a special spiel we had learned in order to ask the absurd question – can five of us girls live in your house this summer? To no avail. People thought it was as crazy as it sounded. Most kids usually found a house after a solid day of asking but we got the feeling it wasn’t going to happen for us. We called Jason for help. He was short on ideas except for the off-chance that the woman in her late 80s that he had stayed with a previous summer would consider allowing five girls to live in her small attic.

We found her house, knocked on her door, and asked the big question. Henrietta ruminated. So long that normally one would recant the question. But our summer hung on this. We could tell she wasn’t thrilled but knew she was our only hope. After strong deliberation, she asked us to reassure her that she would barely even know we were there. Would we make sure we were out of the house before she awakened in the morning and returned after she went to sleep at night? Yes, definitely, we said. We all planned to follow the company’s rigid guidelines meant for our success, so we had to be out until 10 PM anyway. With hesitation and reluctance, adding that her children would be unhappy about it, Henrietta agreed to save us. North Haledon, New Jersey, became our home base for the summer, and our first day on the job would be the following morning.

Unfortunately, my former fear of being stuck with the other girls had taken a stronger physical hold on me. I became sick rather quickly and lost my voice as well. Not a match for walking the streets and talking all day long. We had just agreed to be unseen by Henrietta, so I felt that the next day I would need to hide quietly up in the attic while the others left to begin their work. It’s a bit of a blur now that 23 years have passed, but I remember that at some point I ended up making my situation known to her so that I wouldn’t need to feel sneaky. I have no recollection of the couple days that passed while I laid up there and slept it off. This was not how I wanted to start things off.

There were two twin mattresses in the attic and the girls offered that I should sleep in one of them while I was sick, with the plan that we would all eventually rotate. It never happened. When the time came to change things up, the girls on the floor decided they were happy where they were, and our tiny living space was set.

With a bag full of some heavy-ish sample books and a notebook for making detailed maps of every house and street we walked, we each began the task of scouring major neighborhood areas in our towns every day. Henrietta’s house was on a well, so our days began with a very cold, very short shower. Eventually, living every day the exact same way, including what we ate, we all watched as our digestive systems fell in line too. With perfect regularity, we took turns using the toilet every morning like clockwork. In fact, the company even said that we would know that someone in our group was veering out of their rigid schedule if they stopped being regular.

As for the book-selling, wow. You can’t imagine going door-to-door for 13 1/2 hours a day, all summer, until you’ve done it. We were told that statistically we would make one sale for every 32 doors we visited.

I was assigned to Paterson, New Jersey, and dropped off on a bleak, semi-industrial-looking street my first morning. I remember the very first door I knocked on. The woman who answered let me in and listened to my extended spiel, the one we gave once we got past the front door. After deciding to buy the cookbook we offered, which was $30 instead of the condensed encyclopedias, which were about $240, she wrote a check and then advised me to get out of Paterson. She warned me not to pass the gas station down the street or I would be in danger. You mean the gas station where I was dropped off? She told me that Paterson was known as the crime capital of New Jersey. Quite a switch from Summit, an elite town with fancy gates, high fences, intercoms, and massive manicured lawns.

For the rest of the day, though I was itching to get going, I fumbled through a small area of safe-seeming houses knowing I wouldn’t get picked up until 10 PM. I wasn’t too motivated to sell well because I didn’t want more reasons to have to come back at the end of the summer to deliver books here. I found a pay phone and called the company to tell them about Paterson. They immediately searched for a new location and decided that even though North Haledon had been scoured a few summers back – by Jason or someone in his group – I could go ahead and cover it again.

Things were finally set. Off I went the next morning. For the next few months, I wove my way through all kinds of neighborhoods – woodsy, cookie-cutter, dilapidated, sprawling, Jewish, Syrian, Muslim, you name it. Doors were slammed in my face. Doors were opened. I gave my spiel all day long, sometimes the short version at the door to wary peeker-outers, sometimes to accommodating listeners. Sometimes people surprised me and invited me in soaked with rain.

Once a Syrian woman with no intention to buy anything invited me in purely out of kindness and offered me a seat on her pure white furniture, as sweaty as I was from the heat and humidity outside. I remember not wanting to sweat on her sofa, but wanting to respond properly to her gracious generosity. Set before me on her large coffee table was a beautiful, bounteous spread of all shapes and types of baklava. I was treated as a guest of honor; no one else was around. I politely and gratefully ate some of her treats, then knew I needed to be on my way. The company always stressed that even though there would be some very kind people along our path, we mustn’t stay long. One sale for every 32 doors. (Or two sales for every 64 doors. Three sales for every 96 doors.) That’s a lot of doors to approach every single day. Statistics kept me going. But I’ll never forget the kind-hearted, well-dressed Syrian woman wearing white clothes and a headscarf who invited me in despite how I felt I appeared in contrast.

It didn’t take long for me to feel the black-and-white reality that I could either stay on course and do everything right and rigid each day, or give in to daily fluctuations in rejection and loneliness and allow myself to be derailed. There was a lot of rejection, in all forms ~ 31 closed doors of it for every 1 success. There were times I would’ve liked to sit on the curb for the rest of the day and cry. There were times I would have liked to walk into town and call my parents to hear their voices for awhile. Once I crested a hill with a distant, dreamy view of New York City in the mist and felt like flying over to it on a magic carpet. And only once did I give in and stop at a pizza place. I ordered a piece of pizza and disliked every bite, knowing that I had not set out to eat pizza in New Jersey. I had set out to sell books and do everything I was taught to lead me to success. I never wanted to have to come back and prove myself another summer if I failed to do my best this summer. So I never lapsed again.

Sometimes tears rolled onto my peanut butter and jelly sandwich as I ate it on a curb at the same time every day. But I always got right up when it was finished and moved on.

Despite the rejection, one of the great lessons I learned was the kindness and goodwill of people in general. I gradually got used to people closing doors on me. It wasn’t personal. They just didn’t want to listen to a spiel or buy something. But a lot of days, I saw the wonderful good in people. Like the woman who invited me in her house even though she was sick, overloaded with mothering, and in the middle of making extensive lunches for her many children. She made time for me. Others asked me in for the sole reason of offering me water, drinks, cookies, and goodies. One woman invited me in and ran upstairs to get her camera. She took portraits of me and sent them to my parents. One grandfatherly man saw me from his garage behind the house and called me down the driveway. We exchanged just a few words, then he said, “Do you know how beautiful you are?” He said it in a way that I understood. There was nothing weirdo about it. He was talking about human inner beauty. I know he was stepping in at that moment to give me the gift of encouragement that I needed in order to keep going; the type of gift I normally could only get from my mom or dad, but they were inaccessible. I thanked him for his kind words and left without saying much else because what he said made me well up with tears I knew I couldn’t hold in. They burst out as I got to the sidewalk. I would have liked to thank him profusely. I’ll never forget him.

I clearly remember another time that I was sitting on a curb and needing a kind word. I remember praying, saying, “God, I need something. Anything.” At that moment, a leaf danced slowly down from the tree above me, right in front of my eyes, and landed on my lap. Nothing big and loud. Just a quiet answer, saying, “I’m here. I hear you.” That was all I needed. I got up and went on my way, strengthened.

Unfortunately, I’ll also never forget an opportunity I missed to save someone. After a few weeks in a town, you exhaust all the houses. You have to keep going as you cross over into other towns. My hand-drawn maps were getting to be voluminous, with red-ink stars on the places I’d made sales so I’d know how to find them again when later delivering the books. I was now in a whole different area and I can still make out a particular house in my memory. I went to the door and a tall, thin, gaunt woman in her 30s opened it. She would have been very pretty if she were healthy and happy, but she was very sad-looking, guarded, and undernourished. I began the spiel that sounded like natural, spontaneous conversation – I was very adamant that the spiel never sound like a memorized bunch of words. She was looking through me and not at all there with what I was saying. Several young children ran up behind her and held her legs as they watched me. She told me, with what I distantly recall as perhaps a Russian accent, that she couldn’t make any money decisions; that I should come back when her husband was home. This was not unusual. In fact, this is what made it possible for all of us book sellers to stay out until 10 PM every night. Whenever wives asked if I could come back later, I’d make appointments for later that night and find my way back to all the houses in the evening. At the time, I thought it was sad that all these wives weren’t “allowed” to make spending decisions without their husbands. Now I see it differently; they were all respecting their husbands by making sure they could discuss it together.

When I returned to her house later in the day, I was greeted at the door by a very old man. He was wearing an old, white, worn tank top and was unkempt. She and the children walked up behind him and stayed where they were. Her posture wreaked of submissiveness, even though he was a thin, elderly man, perhaps a few inches shorter than she. He was not one bit interested in what I had to say, and our conversation was fairly short. As he walked away from the door and I turned to leave, she spoke to me in a quiet voice, “Please, help me.” It was then that I realized why she asked me to come back. She had no interest in books; she just needed someone from the outside world to know she was in need. I have no idea what I said but I acknowledged that I had heard her. I didn’t know what I could do. I had no idea what she was experiencing. Was she stuck in a horrible life, a horrible marriage, poverty, and lots of children with no money to support them? Or was there more – was she being threatened, beaten, were her children being molested, or worse? I’ll never know. I didn’t know who to tell. And at that point I may have been in such a solid routine that all I could think about was staying robotically on my schedule. I was like the first few guys in the story of the Good Samaritan. They didn’t get involved; didn’t get dirty; didn’t get off-schedule. Didn’t save a life. Hmmm.

The summer went on. Our only break was Sundays. We always left the house very early and we would often meet up with all the other book sellers from the nearby cities and do something fun. One Sunday we went tubing down a river. Another week we left late, late, late on Saturday night to meet up at a matrix of cabins on a forested hillside. I think the company had a budget that the supervisors used for Sunday activities to boost our morale. A lot of Sundays, we simply went to the local laundromat and talked the hours away about our individual experiences out pounding the pavement.

In keeping with routine, the company had stressed that it was very looked-down-on to ever leave in order to visit relatives or go on family vacations. It would ruin our momentum, they said. I fully understood that, but there was a once-in-a-lifetime family reunion that my mom’s side had planned in Florida. It would never happen again and realistically, I knew I would regret missing the reunion more than I would regret missing a week of book-selling. I believed in myself and that I could come back from that and get immediately back into my spiel groove. I did.

Finally, as it was nearing time for all the books to be delivered to Henrietta’s house so that we could distribute them, we knew that the four of us without cars would each need access to transportation for a week to make deliveries. This meant, you guessed it, that we would each need to find someone willing to lend us a car for 6 days of delivering. This was the hardest part. After months of meeting thousands of people, most of us could think of someone in particular that could help. I could think of no one I had met that had an extra car they’d be willing to lend me for a week. We had settled on The North Haledon Grill as our breakfast stop each morning, so the woman who usually served us had become a friend. Robin was the mother of two young girls, but she had even gone out dancing with us at clubs in the city one Sunday night when we were off. She was good-hearted, generous, and loving. The last thing I wanted to do was take advantage of her goodwill and ask a monumental favor of her. I knew she didn’t have an extra car to lend but I had no other option but to ask the looming question. “Robin,” I asked, “in a week, would you drive me around so that I can deliver the books I’ve sold?” It was not something she could really do, seeing as she worked full-time, then went home to mother her children.

Reluctantly, knowing I had no one else to turn to, she said she would do it whenever she could get off each day from work. That meant I had to wait at the Grill every morning of that final delivery week until she could leave early and take me around. It was not something she wanted to do but she forced herself to have a good attitude and I so appreciated her for that. It was excruciating for me to know that I could be out walking more streets and taking more orders in the meantime, but I wouldn’t know when Robin could go early each day until the moment it happened. So I sat in the Grill eating bowls of Blueberry Morning cereal as I waited.

At this point, all of us who had stuck to our routine had lost 20 or more pounds. Our shirts we came with were baggy and our shorts were almost falling off of us. We had survived every day on a bagel, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a package of uncooked ramen once we plopped down on our beds in the attic each night. We were eating less than we ever had each day, and we were walking through whole towns. I had worked my way through every street of four towns. Now I had to wait seven or eight hours a day. I have always loved cereal, so this was a lovely indulgence.

It was eating at me that while I was waiting in the diner every day with the starry hope that somehow Robin would be able to leave at noon, all the other book sellers were using their 13 1/2 hours each day to not only deliver books but also visit houses where there had been no one home many weeks earlier. They could continue knocking on doors and the company would mail out any last books they sold that week.

I had kept my mind on an all-expenses-paid trip to Cancun that we could win if we crossed a certain target number of sales. But there was nothing I could do but be thankful to Robin, pack her car each evening with mountains of books, and recite directions to her from my homemade maps.

Henrietta had allowed the five of us to fill her empty garage with the truck-full of books that was dropped at her house for that final week. The week flew by, her garage was soon empty, we packed our few things to leave, cleaned her attic and bathroom, and said profuse thank yous as we headed to the car. True to our word, she had rarely seen or heard us all summer.

We began the journey back to Nashville, where we would settle everything with the company and find out exactly how much we had each earned. Dozens and dozens of us sellers sat in a comfortable waiting room for hours, listening each time the intercom sounded and a name and amount was publicly announced. I mourned the loss of two selling weeks due to the reunion and the diner, but I had kept on task every single day of the other 11 weeks. I had kept accurate records of sales, money spent, and money collected. Aside from one piece of pizza, I had spent money on nothing else over and above the communal food costs. I had a good idea of what I would earn.

The intercom sounded with my name. Oh, the joy I felt hearing the results. While I don’t remember the exact amount, I cleared about $10,000 and earned the trip to Cancun. I later received a booklet in the mail showing my photo and ranking as the 32nd highest-earning first-year dealer out of 1,000. And I had even missed two weeks of selling. Part of me wanted to linger in disappointment about where I could have ranked had I been able to sell for those two additional weeks. But that was petty. I was happy. This meant I would never have to do it again. I had proven to myself that I could follow the plan that statistically led to success.

A few minutes later, I was led into a room. A top-selling supervisor who had sold books many summers sat me down at a round table and began to sell me on coming back the next summer. She used every tactic. I said no at every pass. I had no desire to go back and do it again. Frankly, I hated it. I had spent my days out on the streets talking to myself about not ever doing it again; about remembering how grueling it was; about not idealizing it later in my mind once I got a check. That’s what fired me to do my very best; I wanted no regrets. Nothing to taunt me to try a do-over. She tried to lure me with dollar signs at the idea of being a supervisor. Nope. Not interested. Perhaps most people she asked said yes. She was either surprised I’d turn it down or that she couldn’t sell me on it.

The five of us – Kristin, Ellen, Bitsy, Jen, and I – piled in the car, began our journey home, and drove day and night until we returned to Santa Barbara. Didn’t we want to see the country? Adventure some more? Visit some national parks along the way? Not at all. We wanted to go home. To be hugged. To look in our loved ones’ eyes and laugh it all away now that it was officially a memory.

Though I hated it, I am grateful that it happened (and that it’s over!) and will always look back on my summer selling books as an experience that demanded intense growth and quick maturity in discipline, endurance, self-control, persistence, and a dozen other areas. Anything is easy after doing that. We former book sellers are probably some of the most flexible, roll-with-the-changes people there are. I respect the students who actually chose to go back and do it again. They not only had to manage themselves, but several new students who leaned on them for support in sometimes mind-bending ways, I’m sure. Choosing that kind of hell in exchange for personal growth and self-mastery is respectable. They are now probably some of the movers and shakers out there in today’s world.

Someday, if a group of college kids comes to your door needing a room for the summer while they sell books door-to-door all day long, it’s crazy, yes, but a scam? No. Help them. They will respect your space and pay it forward later. And they’ll never forget your kindness.