For the drive south, I bought a Time Magazine because the cover story was about the Mariel boatlift. One hundred and forty thousand Cubans arrived in Florida in 1980 alone, and most had settled in Miami. The story said Miami in the 1980s was in a state of upheaval. I remember thinking that’s fine. I am too.
When we got as far as Dade county we took a room in a motel right off U.S 1 that looked like it had been built in the fifties or sixties. We had 48 hours to find an apartment because Roy's company would pay for our motel for only two nights. We had no idea where to look, and knew no one in the city, so we bought a newspaper and headed about 15 miles outside of Miami to Kendall where most of the apartments were advertised.
The woman we rented from was a tall Latina in her 40s who wore a ring with a diamond so big she had it mounted on a tiny axle, so it would swirl in circles when she moved her hand. She owned one of the first portable phones I’d ever seen.
I was thrilled about the condo complex because there was a community pool and our place had a washer and dryer in a small laundry room off the kitchen. The laundry room was the only room in the condo that wasn’t filled with the smell of salt air mixed with wet wool. A “bug man” the landlady paid for visited once a month. I could always tell when he’d been there because whatever he sprayed mingled with the heavy salt air and left a distinct tangy gasoline smell for hours. When I first found out about the bug man I was insulted. I thought it was a sign we were living in something close to a tenement. But I found out that in Miami it was the opposite; not to have a bug man visit on a regular basis was a sign of that very thing. When I figured this out I started to look forward to his visits and tried to be home when he came because welcoming him in to spray made me feel like the real lady of the house instead of a renter.
I was never so lonely in my life.
One of the few people I met during my first weeks at the condo complex was an older gentleman, about eighty-three. Al told me he made his fortune thanks to a health crisis in New York City in the 1930s. He’d been selling paper cups there at the time, but they hadn’t caught on yet. Then he got his lucky break. There was an outbreak of trench mouth in the city, and the government strongly encouraged everyone to use paper cups. (“Government agencies are a great ally to have if they’re on your side, but watch out when it’s the other way around!”) His sales sky-rocketed and the cups caught on for good. His future was secure.
I told him I was in sales too. Right away he asked me if I spoke Spanish. When I told him I didn’t, he just walked away and took a chair by the pool.
I didn’t understand his lack of interest in my job prospects, until a week or two later. Miami had become bi-lingual. He knew my chances of getting a sales gig in Miami in the 80s without speaking Spanish were as slim as a paper cup salesman making a killing in a bacteria-free world.
But then I got lucky; I got a trench mouth epidemic of my own. The federal government (“Good if they’re on your side!”) broke up Ma Bell and along with it the idea of one yellow page phone book per city.
As a result, a well known yellow page company out of the Midwest came to Miami to open new territory. A fleet of people came in from the home office to do the hiring, but because there were no feet on the ground permanently, their sales hiring criterion did not include the ability to speak Spanish. I saw their help-wanted ad in the paper, and I finally got a gig.
In my sales training class, I met one of the most beautiful women, in an old fashioned all American Beauty rose way, that I had ever seen. Piper Black was sandy-haired, blue-eyed, and just a picture. If Walt Disney wanted to send someone to sweep about and enchant the copier in the yellow page training room in Hialeah, and Cinderella was on assignment, he would have sent Piper.
I walked up to Piper right away and tried to make her my friend. I considered being friends with a woman so beautiful a test of my character. We clicked right away. Maybe she was grateful I approached her, or maybe women didn’t do that often. We were about the same age.
Piper was smart too. If she had been just a beautiful idiot I wouldn’t have had the character or the desire to get past “Hi!” But I could see right away, by the way she took simple concise notes in class, and just by the look on her face, she was sharp. She was doing this whole thing with one eye shut. It got so she and I would exchange glances, then laugh during the breaks at some of the comments made by the old-time salesmen; like making comparisons between selling yellow page ads to selling siding.
We started going to lunch together on the first day of training. She told me she’d just separated from her husband, a man who owned a chain of bakeries across the south, and was now living with her parents in Coral Gables. I believed this made her something of a kindred spirit. She needed this gig as badly as I did.
Right away she insisted on paying for lunch for both of us. She would say “you get it the next time”, but she was always too quick. I didn’t like that. I wanted to go Dutch like women do. I wouldn’t understand why she always wanted to pay for both of us until much later.
When she told me she’d never been in sales before, I tried to give her an education on the profession. She loved to hear my running commentaries on salesmen. She’d laugh till she pounded her palm in the steering wheel, or had to blow her nose. I was so pleased that I could make my new friend laugh, I started to set aside time in the shower in the morning to think of funny salesmen trivia to tell her later that day.
After we were given our assignments Piper invited me to her house to meet her parents. Her parent’s home in Coral Gables was big and old and beautiful. It was dark and cool inside like a castle. It was the first house I’d seen that had a guest room with a private bathroom or two ovens in the kitchen. The dual ovens so impressed me I was too dumbfounded to ask why this might be necessary.
On my first visit, her dad was sitting in a lounge chair under an orange tree near a beautiful swimming pool in the back yard, reading a book. Her mother was just leaving for a meeting. Both of them stopped what they were doing to say hello and ask a few questions about where I lived and where I was from. I liked that. It made me feel safe and secure. I was the new playmate, and the responsible parents were checking me out. They were older than my own parents, maybe in their 60s.
I realized Piper’s parents were rich, but I didn’t feel that changed anything between us. It was her parents who were rich. She was working in the same job I was. I imagined her parents were charging her a lot for rent. I also assumed she had a car payment, and of course other incidental expenses.
We had a salary for the first month after training to give us time to fill our sales pipeline. Then a straight commission plan kicked in. The salary was pretty good, and I tried to save as much of it as I could. Not because of any lack of belief in my sales ability, but I’d had salary/draw combinations before and I knew they could be tricky. You never knew when you might be presented with a complicated spreadsheet with a figure printed in red at the bottom.
Piper was different. She wasn’t afraid to spend her salary on manicures and pedicures, or hardcover books as soon as they were released, or on hand crèmes with foreign names. I thought that was a neat way to live; and I saw her as brave and confident.
We weren’t in the field a week before we began to complain to each other about the futility of trying to close business in our new gig. After the initial sales pitch, we were supposed to paste up the ads for the businesses’ approval ourselves in both Spanish and English. But neither of us knew enough Spanish to paste-up anything. We were dead in the water.
Continued in Part II
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