Never deviate from your plans, unless you like the newer option better, or the one after that
Focus
Leadership Week
Daniel’s best friend Jordan ushered him into his living room, where four other couples from their church waited along with a guy in a suit that Daniel had never seen before. Jordan’s wife Cherry offered him a cup of coffee just as he spotted the black sample case behind the lazy boy. “Who’s the salesman?”
Cherry leaned into his ear. “I thought you were bringing Karen.”
He raised his coffee cup, a cheap china knockoff Cherry bought from Karen’s garage sale two summers before. “She thinks it’s an Amway pitch. Couldn’t convince her otherwise.”
When he added that he’d prefer a Scotch rocks, Cherry whispered, “It’s not a cocktail party.”
Jordan cleared his throat and introduced the night’s speaker. Charlie Waters groaned from the far end of the couch. “For Christ’s sake, is this Amway?” Jordan advised him to be patient, and he’d find out in a moment, Charlie crossed his legs and arms and slumped into the couch. “Yep. It’s fucking Amway.”
He raised his coffee cup, a cheap china knockoff Cherry bought from Karen’s garage sale two summers before. “She thinks it’s an Amway pitch. Couldn’t convince her otherwise.”
Once Cherry calmed Charlie down, the speaker raised a white board and asked each of them to name their dream. Charlie pointed an accusing finger. “See? Amway. You think I haven’t sat through this a million times?” But Charlie’s wife Janine (who made out with Daniel in the closet during his son Bernard’s Bar Mitzvah, and even added a little under the zipper action) calmed Charlie down and the speaker drew a circle with six circles, each with six more circles and explained how Daniel would earn millions. He’d own a yacht, a Rolls Royce, a home in the Hamptons, and wear a Rolex on each wrist and his ankles.
All he had to do was sell a few bottles of coconut soap and con some buddies into selling it too.
Daniel wrote the check and left the box on the kitchen table to surprise Karen in the morning. In the morning, however, Karen took one look at the box and told Daniel to return it. She didn’t even change her mind when he showed her how to take shoe polish out of her shirt with the soap. (Actually, it didn’t remove the shoe polish, and it was her favorite shirt, which made her madder.)
But when she left, Daniel called in sick to work and spent the rest of the day making a list of friends and contacts, poring over the product catalogue and practicing his pitch. Nothing would stop him from his dream of making millions. At least, not until he took a break to watch a show about flying saucers on the History Channel and realized he was an alien abductee.
Gone, and hopefully forgotten.
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Wry noir author Phillip T. Stephens wrote Cigerets, Guns & Beer, Raising Hell, the Indie Book Award winning Seeing Jesus, and the children’s book parody Furious George. Follow him at Phillip T Stephens.
