My First Business
Johnpaulriger
It was a short walk the next morning to the main street cafe from the old rodeo grounds and we were feeling a little guilty about being bystanders to the screams of someone in desperate need the night before. When sitting down to a breakfast of eggs and coffee, we asked our waitress about the commotion on the bridge the previous evening to learn that the news had already gone through town. Apparently a woman known about town for being a regular bar patron had gone out of control again. Our waitress and another knew her by name. They made it sound as though it was another normal night out for her as they laughingly each drew on their cigarettes. We were relieved to know that all had ended well the night before.
We finished our breakfast and returned to the two-lane highway east. As we walked, we passed a motorcycle shop. How fun would it be to own a bike or two? It would kind of have the adventure of hitchhiking but without the wait to constantly test one’s patience. We really enjoyed the unpredictability of our travels, but knew well that soon the lack of money and the coming of fall would narrow our choices. The dream of traveling by motorcycle would have to wait.
Our day’s travel was led by curiosity because the road east headed toward some new mountains. We’d gotten a few short rides back to back and around noon we found ourselves walking across a small coal mining town called Somerset. In the heart of town was a small, one-room post office and a kind of bar. We ducked into the bar to get the local read on job prospects.
The bar was dark and had a dank, musty smell masked by that old fragrance of rotting beer and cigarette smoke. I ended up in conversation with the owner as Libby shot a rack of pool. Midway through our conversation another patron joined in with an attentive ear. We talked much about the local area. As it turned out mining was the be all and end all of the tiny town. There was no other employment. We learned too that the hills were teaming with game. Elk and deer mostly but ample bear, sheep, and even goats could be had within a short drive from town. The land didn’t seem typical of what I always figured elk and deer habitat would be but the bar owner and the other guy were enthusiastic about the abundance of local game.
It sounded like getting a mining job wasn’t easy and you almost had to know somebody to get your foot in the door. A short, pudgy fellow listening in on my conversation with the bar owner turned out to be a coal miner. He said that the money was good as a miner but it was a tough lifestyle. I could see in his eye that he had undisclosed intention as he invited us to his house to learn more about Somerset. Libby had finished her game of pool and so the three of us walked less than a block to his little coal house. His was a cookie cutter Victorian house, cute in all respects except that it was less than ten feet from the two-lane highway that cut straight through the heart of the little town. Everything in Somerset, including his house, was covered with a light dusting of fine, black coal.
He sat us down in his living room and offered us a beer. He was a friendly fellow we could tell but he soon changed the subject from coal mining to another means of making wealth. We listened with full, undivided attention as he rambled on and on about a side business he was starting called “Amway.” We watched in utter fascination as he drew circles then more circles on a piece of paper.
We both really struggled to follow his rationale but we were hooked the moment he drew a circle, pointed to it with his pen and said, “This is you!” Then he said, “Once you go direct you’ll have a monthly paycheck for the rest of your life.” Then he started to show us pictures of folks that had gone direct, some in as little as a few weeks.
We looked at each other dumbfounded. We had no clue just where the money would come from but he said it was completely legal and that we could do “it” too. We struggled so hard to understand just exactly what “it” was. We learned that “it” had something to do with soap. Time and time again he explained how “it” worked. But “it” made absolutely no sense whatsoever to either of us. After an hour or so of presentation the coal miner made a phone call to his Amway boss. Minutes later we were in his car headed once again for Grand Junction, the opposite direction of our day’s intended path.
Grand Junction was a two-hour drive from Somerset and the coal miner had changed into his Sunday best before we left his house. As we drove there was no chance of changing the subject, as he was clearly obsessed with his Amway business. He talked on and on and I started feeling stupid because I couldn’t understand “it” despite his persistent efforts. Except for knowing that within a few days we’d be raking in money hand over fist, we’d have walked away right then and there. Our stupidity was so obvious. I felt almost like I was back in trigonometry class. We had talked about it before and Libby and I both swore that trig was a conspiracy. Even though we studied trig in high school several states apart, we remembered how the teacher and the two kids clear in the back of the class understood it completely. To them it all made perfect sense. But everybody else in the class looked at each other scratching their heads wondering just how it was that the teacher and two pupils in the back of class had cooked up such an elaborate scheme. We really wanted to understand but the more we learned the more befuddled we got.
As we drove on I started to daydream back to when I was a kid and my mom got into something similar back east. Back then they called it Shaklee instead of Amway. I knew little about it back then but it had all the makings of the same kind of ordeal. I remembered how they advertised that you could drink their brand name. Now why you or anybody else would want to drink a glass of basic H is beyond me except to say that you could drink it. Maybe it was the same kind of motivation that drove the goofy neighbor kids to down night crawlers on the school bus.
Then I remembered how Shaklee had branched out to a more diversified product line. One time the sales rep, who was dealing to my mom, got busted by the cops for handing out some kind of protein pills to the other little kids on our block. Apparently, one of the parents in the neighborhood was afraid he was peddling LSD or something to the kids on their bikes and tricycles. He spent the night in jail I remembered.
Yeah, maybe we’d better be a little careful, I thought as we pulled into a residential community in Grand Junction. I could see our new friend was desperate to get something going that would get him out of the mine once and for all. Perhaps the motivation was the same for my mom, to feed five hungry mouths. Yeah, these are all good folks trying to find another way, I concluded.
We climbed up a staircase to a condominium to meet our coal miner’s dealer who too wore spiffy Sunday clothes. We sat down in his living room to talk about money and dreams and such. Then he started in again with those damned circles on paper and promises of never-ending, monthly income. When he finished the first segment of his spiel we walked outside to view the setting western sky from the balcony. That Amway thing had taken up an entire day and we were no closer to understanding “it” then than we were at two o’clock. There was another young man there who was a bit further into his indoctrination. I asked him if he got “it.” He kind of looked at me with a smile.
“I guess so. My weekend plans fell through anyway,” he explained.
I asked him what else he had planned. He said that he and some friends were originally going to the Telluride Jazz Festival for the weekend but it didn’t work out. He said that if we wanted his tickets, we could have them for free. He opened his wallet and handed me two concert tickets.
“Are you sure?” I said as I took the two tickets in hand.
“No, you guys go right ahead,” he said. “Chic Corea is playing tomorrow night. It should be one heck of a show,” he added with a smile.
We immediately walked over to our new, pudgy, coal miner friend and told him that we’d think his offer over for a few days, but that we were going to head back up to Telluride for the jazz festival. His subtle disappointment was broken with a grin and moments later we were strapping on our packs headed south for Telluride, just we two. Well into the night we hopped out of a truck somewhere between Delta and Montrose to sleep just off-road a stretch.
John Paul Riger
http://www.myspace.com/gastonjazzpianist
Johnpaulriger @ September 12, 2008
Johnpaulriger