I took the train on the red line from the industrial, refinery towns to the downtown exit near the University. I was early for my interview, so I had a chance to walk around.
The Dress for Less discount clothing store where I’d bought my wardrobe when I started teaching English was a Walgreens now, but people on the main street leading to the University looked the same. It was early fall, and there were the same newly arrived foreign exchange students huddled together in hushed groups trying so hard to look like they belonged it made them look even more out of place. The grandchildren of foreign exchange students from decades past rushed by them with bemused if not superior glances and smirks. In a few months the awkwardness and the response would diminish, much like it had for generations since the 1960s.
There were the same congregations of deeply mentally ill homeless people, playing chess with addicts and college dropouts. At times they’d burn off their frustrations by leaping randomly at street hustlers and the middle class white Baby Boomers activists heading to a protest ensuring their continued right to do so. Not all homeless in this city were suffering from psychosis, but the ones near the train station had to be volatile to maintain their position.
Although it seemed impossible, I could have sworn the same construction barricades and plywood alleys of the prior decade were still surrounding the same train exits. I imagine the middle-class Baby Boomers who had arrived in search of opportunity in the 1960s recognized them too.
I had taken Latin from a Bulgarian woman not far from the train stop, at an antique college extension a block or so away. The university ran its odd, poorly attended classes out of a stately though rickety annex, with its aging earthquake damage, broken floor tiles, creaking stairs, ancient plumbing, hollow vents and chilly furnace.
This was apparently no longer so. The old, shabby white austerity of a turn-of-the-century neoclassical institution fallen on hard times had been repainted in hues of butternut squash and saffron. Rainbows of Tibetan prayer flags canopied the front, and signs proclaiming a private college in Tibetan Buddhism hung at its (locked) gates. I recognized the name of the group overseeing the new ancient institution as one advertising for a social media and marketing manager who must be willing to work without compensation other than food and shelter in the collective.
Meanwhile, the places that sold alcohol remained unchanged over the last twenty years.
I wandered back toward the main street and passed a cafe that had been there for as long as I could remember, although probably under a dozen names. I tried to visualize any variations from the many times I’d been there, but could only remember hints of the past lighting, echoes of old chair orientations, and ghosts of the people I’d been with.
In high school I would come here before Rocky Horror Picture Show, trying to stay awake for my boyfriend’s band to perform in the pre-show every Saturday for a year. I raced over after my swing shift at the copy shop in my 1977 salvaged Volvo, covered in dents (none of which were mine) and graffiti (some of which was.) I had been here on the night it finally died, when my choice of spending money on U-joints to keep the car moving instead of a water pump to keep the engine cooled resulted in an engine cracked in six places. I hitched a ride the last fifteen miles with a gas station attendant. We arrived after the band played, but my boyfriend and I took him out to coffee to thank him for not murdering me and leaving my body on the side of a road somewhere.
I remembered the time we left the cafe in the wee hours only to find ourselves caught between protesting forces, holding rocks and bottles coming from one side, and a riot-gear covered wall of police, braying in megaphone voices that tear gas would be eminent, coming from the other. We hung there, suspended in the tension of magnetic poles in the hours between night and morning, wondering if we should take a breath before a violent fire consumed all of the oxygen in the street.
Anyone who has been in a protest knows patiently waiting in this suffocating emotional fog is a common part of activism. Much of the strategy is waiting out the other side, hoping no one develops cabin fever while trapped in the claustrophobic funeral cloths of failing institutions. You can see their eyes go lifeless, as though coins were placed over their dead eyes, and then blind animalistic destruction explodes. On the protest side, it might be the lobbing of a Molotov cocktail at a store or a busted car window. On the police side it might be an itchy trigger finger. This was the early nineties, in a world that had seen the Rodney King trial and Kurt Cobain’s suicide, but hadn’t yet heard of Columbine and thought the World Trade Center bombing meant a suicide bomber with a van and a failed plan in the garage. Protests were frequent, but police militarization was more rare.
We floated like astronauts in the expansive space between factions, unsure how to avoid drifting into the sun or dying in our ship’s explosion. Like many of those astronaut movies, there was a lot of silence, a lot of tedium, and an eventual fizzling out of tension and anxiety until everyone present made it through the atmosphere, and landed safely home. In the daylight of a post-Ferguson world, the ghosts of conflicts past seemed to lurk in the shadows of old trees, the wisps of low morning haze, and the deep creases lining the faces of people passed out in the daylight on the street.
I snapped back into the present day and began to walk back toward my interview. I looked at the faces of the homeless and street people as I passed, wondering if I knew anyone. I doubted I would see the older people I had befriended in my youth. Even if someone was able to stay out of trouble and in one spot for long enough, the likelihood of anyone surviving that long was low. I would not have been surprised to find childhood friends, however, burdened by addiction, mental illness, or poverty. Over the last twenty plus years I’d been panhandling memories at this particular train station alongside friends spare-changing on the avenue. I had recognized faces in this crowd of the forgotten many times before, sometimes kids I’d last seen in this very spot years before, but today everyone was a stranger.
The interview was for a marketing coordinator specializing in event planning and promotion for telecommunications companies. They were a top sales and marketing company, they claimed, and required new employees to go through a training program in their internal promotional and marketing processes. In addition to a marketing coordinator, they were looking for someone to transition into a more managerial role later. Attire was business professional, as many of their clients were Fortune 500 corporations.
I was agnostic about even coming to this second interview. The first had gone well, but they had been hesitant to discuss certain proprietary business information until after the initial screening. They were a bit too eager for someone with my qualifications, and although one CEOs name was easily found, given his promotion only 3 weeks earlier and youthful marketing videos for assorted sales schemes and “ground floor opportunities” from prior years, the mentor and partner he frequently named was no where on official records. The lobby was filled with statues declaring this partner, a Mr. Smith, as salesman of the year, but there was nothing on display with in the young CEO’s name. This interview was supposed to be with the shadowy Mr. Smith.
When I arrived in the basement office under the movie theater, it still looked legitimate. A receptionist greeted visitors in the lobby, which was filled with fresh, eager college graduates in their first business attire: ill-fitting suits combined with juvenile or informal accessories and questionable choices. Slightly more wizened 22 and 23 year-olds in better suits buzzed into the room with the humming busy-ness and drive of a bumblebee combined with the out-of-place, bumbling awkwardness of a bumblebee. Young adults tugged awkwardly at cheap polyester collars and slacks borrowed from food service uniforms as they waited for an opportunity at a better life. People in more expensive, better fitting suits, but equally ill-at-ease with the acting and blocking of their performance came to scurry new arrivals off to conference rooms and other places in the building.
I was collected by an awkward and comically self-important young man in a pinstripe suit who held a chart and a map in one hand. As was true of the CEO, and I suspected of the others, he aggressively shot out a hand to make a theatrical but limply delivered handshake. We walked out of the building as he led back to the cafe I’d recognized from my youth, dropping occasional breadcrumbs of small talk along the way. I’d refer back to information he mentioned in passing throughout the interview, and he would be astounded at my knowledge of him each time.
In the cafe, I noticed several tables occupied by one well-dressed young person holding a chart and a map, conspiratorially circling and arrowing things toward an often less well-dressed teen or twenty-something. Between what I’d seen in the lobby and what was present here, at least twenty to thirty interviews were probably going on in any given hour.
After the “executive” (as he introduced himself) bought me a beverage, he began to go over his little chart. I was expecting a time share-like sales pitch of multilevel marketing proportion, and was not disappointed. The marketing firm, he explained, was egalitarian in that everyone started on the ground floor. In the same job. On the left of the chart.
At the top of the chart were the titles Sales Executive, Account Executive, Junior Executive, Senior Executive, etc. If a person started on the left, in as few as 3-4 weeks they could be promoted to Account Executive. That was the person “interviewing” me. His job was essentially going over the chart with fresh meat.
The position was like a marketing position, because direct sales was a subset of marketing, he explained. And they worked events, in that the companies that hired them held events in stores and we were supposed to work them. The nature of the vents were sales, and the locations were the mall or consumer electronics stores. Our commissions would be based on how many suckers we pressured into signing up for a cable installation or cell phone plan. Commissions were paid 30 days or more later, after the people went all the way through with the deal.
There was a lot to this kind of work, said the executive who had moved here from Arizona, with no family or prospects in the area, after graduating college only a few months earlier. You had to learn a lot of marketing techniques in order to close the number of sales needed to advance, he continued, so morning were spent in training. From 8:30 am to noon, you would be on training calls or practicing street sales to learn the process of selling to people in stores. Then you’d have plenty of time before 1 pm for a nice hour long lunch. Of course, SOME of that time was also to drive yourself, unpaid and without reimbursement, to your afternoon assignment. (The interview was half an hour from my house without traffic, and normally an hour in traffic, but had been nearly two hours away that particular morning.)
After completing your assignment, you were expected to return to go over your numbers for the day, and then finally dismissed at 6pm. You would receive a base pay of seventy dollars a day, or $420 per week.
“But…,” I started, even my mediocre math skills noticing a problem.
“You see, $70 x 6 = $420. We work on Saturdays as well. If you make your numbers, you can leave after the update meeting though,” said executive.
“But…,” I started, even my mediocre math skills still noticing a problem. “Even excluding travel time back and forth, you’d still be working full-time days. That’s less than minimum wage. I assume they have you classified as exempt from overtime.”
“There’s no overtime.”
“Right, but, how do they account for that in the law? If you’re assigned at least 45-50 hours per week, how are they legally getting away with it?”
I knew there were many ways to circumvent labor law. In the occupation I had just left the standard hustle was illegally classifying employees as independent contractors. In the one before it was classifying non-managerial or administrative positions as managerial so they’d count as exempt. I couldn’t remember the laws governing commissioned salespeople. Often training time was provided at a lower rate as well.
“I don’t know that,” said the formally trained marketing expert and business executive. “You’d have to ask the hiring manager.”
“Well, who signs your paychecks? Is it the business name, the telecommunications client, some other name?”
As the executive continued, I began to understand the plan.
You see, if you are willing to sell dozens of items on behalf of multi-billion dollar conglomerates that the federal government has tried to regulate and disband in the past for monopoly and anti-consumer practices, and then you are willing to sign dozens and dozens of others underneath you, you can start your own marketing franchise. Under a new name.
Get into trouble under your own name? Hand the reins to an underling. Too many scam reports accumulating and need to get out of dodge? Start a new company and expand your service area. Things not going well enough to increase the pay of those under you in the pyramid? Close before their year of training is complete and start a new one in one of the international locations serviced by the shadowy, unnamed overlord corporation. He showed me a map with thousands and thousands of tiny dots all across the country. Each one represented a “marketing agency” just like this one, all with disconnected vague names like “Smith and Jones” or “Marketing Executives.” I made small talk as I tried to determine how the names I had researched fit together into the larger virus spreading across the country.
Our interview began to wind down and the executive suggested we head back for “the second phase.” This was when I would be re-interviewed by One of Our CEOs or a Hiring Manager. We walked back to the office, where I’d be given a quiz on what I’d just learned about their Way, and a questionnaire for the “CEO.” I began to salivate like a wolf over an unguarded baby at the idea of interviewing the supposed CEO of this scam. I knew shaking my tiny little fist would be pointless, but at least I’d waste their time as much as they had wasted mine.
I walked back into the lobby, now filled with different people. The hungry college kids from earlier had been churned out and replaced with older people. There were older men with even older hands whose tan brown skin was prematurely wrinkled by years in a harsh sun. There were older, overweight women in leg, knee, and foot braces with canes leaned against chairs. There were ancient small women in corner seats wearing cultural garb from countries they had abandoned probably before my birth. All were waiting to be collected and sold a dream of prosperity by some upstart executive being paid minimum wage.
I sat there, staring blankly at my questionnaire, trying to find the right words to shame whatever huckster was at the top of this tiny little branch of the pyramid scheme. It was all perfectly legal, I was sure, as the law was designed to let some sorts of spiders weave webs in space between legitimate enterprise. How else would giant corporations under constant oversight find new avenues to underpaid and exploited labor forces. It was certainly unethical, but such arguments would be pointless against someone whose personal brand of manifest destiny involved an Entourage-cum-Wolf of Wall Street ideology ending with him in a carefree hot tub of sparkling wine and cheap, store-bought emblematic trophy women.
I waited for a hush in the hustle of smarmy suits scurrying in an out and walked to the reception desk to return my questionnaire, of which they undoubtedly had thousands of copies. “I’m so sorry,” I said, “I’m afraid I can’t stay.”
“Oh that’s all right,” she said, as I worriedly and hurriedly walked toward the door. “Do you have another appointment?”
“Oh no,” I yelled back across the lobby, hoping all of its occupants would hear and save themselves, knowing even this dozen would be replaced by another soon enough. “It’s because this all reeks of a multilevel marketing scam and I have to get out of this awful place!”
I thought about FTC and Attorney General complaints as I walked by the decades-long familiarity of homeless people and construction barricades, and descended to the underground train station.
I waited for the red line to come again.