Amway.

There.  The worst’s behind me.  Five years.  At least.  Not much more you can do to hurt me once you know that.  Like a loose tooth that needs pulling or a band-aide that has to come off: it’s best to get it over quickly.

It’s a funny business.  A “rinky-dink” soap business according to most.  But with five years in and countless books, tapes, and rallies-all over the country-I know better.  The business isn’t rinky-dink.  It’s more like it’s just too tough for most people.  Me included.  But there’s almost no one who wouldn’t want to have the financial freedom it can produce if you have what it takes to build it big: “A DREAM.”

The Pointy Headed Insurance Guy. And Vietnam Vet.

While we were in Amway, I was also an insurance salesman.  My partner in that business was a guy named Tony Cook.  I’ve blogged about him before.  A Princeton grad, he was a French professor at Denver University before he got into insurance.  And before he did that, he volunteered with the Army to serve as a French interpreter in Vietnam.  Six months after he came home in September of ’71, the province in which he had worked was overrun by the North Vietnamese.  The closest a Princeton student gets to combat now?  Screaming obscenities at a BLM riot.

Tall and lanky, Tony was an intellectual’s intellectual.  He wore well used penny loafers on feet that were so narrow that they looked like short skis at the ends of his pipe cleaner legs.  We were both avid readers, but Tony devoured esoteric books in English and French.

We were also classical music buffs, but my tastes weren’t up to his rarified standards.  “Colorado Public Radio Classical plays the same music over and over,” he told me once.  With the passing of years and my continued listening to CPR, I can confirm that Tony pretty much nailed it:  the station has something approximating a “Top 40’s of the Classics Chart.”  Of what else might be out there in the way of classical music, I’m a poor judge.  But Tony was a good one; he must have had a huge record collection.

What Does It Take?

Once, we went to meet with an insurance prospect on South Colorado Boulevard.  I don’t remember much about the meeting; I’d be surprised if we made the sale.  But I knew that there was a Cadillac dealership we could drop by on the way back to the office.  “Hey,” I said to him, “why don’t we stop in at Rickenbaugh Cadillac before we go back to the office?”

“Why would we want to do that?” responded Tony, looking over skeptically from behind the wheel of the Mercury mini-van that was the perfectly sensible choice for his family of five.

What he didn’t know was that I was doing Amway on the side.  “Well,” I answered, “we need to have a reason to keep beating our heads against the wall of this insurance stuff, don’t we?  Wouldn’t a nice car be a motivation?”

“I don’t suppose,” he answered, “that it would hurt if we stopped by for a few minutes.”

So that’s what we did.  For a few minutes.  I think Tony was clueless as to what I was up to.  As unobtrusively as possible, he looked at the shiny objects on the showroom floor while fending off the circling sales sharks.  While I did my best to conjure up a dream big enough to build Amway to the point where I didn’t need to work for Tony any longer.  While also fending off the salesmen.  Oh, what a tangled web . . .

That stab at dream building didn’t work then.  Or any of the other many times I tried it.  But the exhausting drives to frenzied “major functions” all over the country, from Orlando to Sacramento, were more than enough to trigger manic episodes.

Release the Kraken!

At least, that is, until the inevitable rebound.  At which point I was lower than a snake belly in a wagon rut.  Again.

The self-contempt I could experience after yet another failed attempt to “show the plan” knew few bounds.  Pound the steering wheel?  You bet.  Carefully plot how to get a revolver, hike up above the 4th of July campground toward Arapahoe Pass-a gorgeous valley that I knew so well-and veer off the trail into the thick woods and end it all under an obscure tree?  Not to be found before some hunters happened on my rotting corpse during the next elk season?  Yep.  Been there.  But, by God’s grace, didn’t do that.  Curse myself in the vilest of terms?  Again, yep.  But you’d best plug your ears and send the kiddies out of the room:  “You syphilitic rectal refuse!”  Don’t shoot the messenger; I’m just reporting.  For me, the nightmares were always the other side of THE DREAM.

This Time, It’s Personal

Why did I take the Amway business so hard?  It’s a good question.  And one for which I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer.

When someone told me “No” in the insurance business, it could be frustrating.  And there were times I badly needed the money.  But suicidal?  No.  Maybe it was because, although I believed in the product enough to own insurance myself, I never saw it as a particularly attractive solution to life’s problems.  Want to get something from your health insurance policy?  Get sick.  Disability insurance?  Get so badly injured you can’t work.  Life insurance?  Die.  Sure, protection from all those bad things is important.  But insuring those bad things doesn’t somehow transform them into good things.  They’re still disasters.  Nowhere near a dream.

In the end, it was probably a combination of things.  The untreated bipolar disorder.  The “burning the candle at both ends” that poured fuel on the bipolar fire.  But perhaps the best way I can explain it ?  Every time someone told me “No,” it was  like having someone peel open my chest, peer contemptuously at the dreams I held dear, and sneer, “Amway?   I’m not interested in that.”

This Is The End

I finally told Marleen that I couldn’t do it any more as we drove to a “seminar and rally” in Colorado Springs one Saturday.  After years of effort, the only thing we could show for our work were losses that we could use to off-set some of my meager earnings in the insurance business.

“Babe, I just can’t do this any more,” I told her.  “It’s just too depressing for me.”

“Yeah,” she shot back at me, “so, what are we going to do?  Live on my part-time nurse’s salary?  I’m not going back to work full time and put our kids in day care.”

An icy silence filled the car during the drive to and from the Springs. And that was only the beginning of a lengthy ice age in our marriage.