Sex, Lies and the Dirty (16 page)

When you’re good at something, you can be an asshole and get away with it.
Just think about all those professional athletes and Hollywood actors who treat normal people like shit. Win a Super Bowl or an Academy Award and suddenly you’re above the common man. You can spit in the face of a child and the parents will thank you for it. It’s a standard practice: the better you are in your particular field, the more leverage you have over people.

I was good at my job.

Really fucking good.

Between my hard-on for money and the drive to prove my racist boss wrong about me, a perfect storm happened, and from the wreckage rose a salesman. After months of Sean calling me sand Canadian and thousands of calls later, something clicked and my natural charm was being channeled into the job. The scam. I was scamming so many people. It started at around twenty per day. Then about thirty. Eventually, it got to the point where 45% of the total appointments were being set by me. One guy doing roughly half the company’s work. There were some days where Sean would literally pull the chair of every employee but me. It’s not that he didn’t want to. He couldn’t. I was too good.

The problem was that I became self-aware of the fact.

I had paid my dues on the phones and wanted the SAE job, had been asking Sean about it for quite some time. About every twenty minutes I
was walking up to the appointment board and ringing the sales bell—not celebrating, but sending a message to Sean. I was telling him that I’ve risen to the top and I wanted out. I wanted the opportunity I had rightfully earned, yet, every time I approached him on the subject and got the same bullshit about not acting like a sand Canadian.

He told me, “You’ll go out when we say you do, carpet bomber.”

And then he went and took someone else’s chair away from them. I had been doing the phone scam for more than a half a year by this point and Sean was going to keep me there, in my seat, calling and calling and calling for as long as he could. The calls wouldn’t end. The scam had no end. I was going to be there forever if I didn’t do something drastic.

I decided to take away the only thing from Sean that I could.

I started tanking it.

I went from thirty or forty appointments a day to one or two. I stopped coming in early and staying late, stopped skipping my breaks. It was like being a new hire again. Me, sitting there on the phone and pretending it was my first day: flubbing my lines, screwing up my pitch. Playing with my cell phone. This was my internal strike.

I wanted something. Sean refused to give it to me.

All things considered, he should have seen it coming.

The first couple of days, he thought it was a fluke. He asked me questions about my health or if something was wrong. Sean was trying to figure out why his top producer was suddenly performing like a rookie. He was panicking because he forgot how much he had grown to rely upon me. Hooman Karamian was Mr. Dependable in his eyes, and then he became Mr. Rebel.

The flow chart of blame worked like this: the bosses saw the numbers, and the numbers were about 45% less than what they normally were. The bosses then yelled at Sean about the shitty numbers, which in turn led to Sean yelling at me in a way that only Sean could:

“You fucking sand nigger motherfucker! Do you know how much you’re fucking me?! Get your terrorist ass out of that fucking chair!”

Sean’s mouth in my ear, breath like stale coffee and vending machine food, he yelled, “Get your fucking ass in gear, you fuck! You hear me, you little sand-cunt? A-B-C! A-B-C! Close the fucking deal, shitbag!”

He took the chair.

I smiled. I was smiling because breaking people is fun, and the guy was cracking after only a few days. Just a few days of striking and I was going to get what I wanted, and by all means, he could have fired me. Sean could have, but he knew it would be much easier to bargain with me rather than attempting to find another golden goose.

NPMG was a shit job. It paid dick. Sean was a fucking terrible boss. The hours sucked. It wasn’t meaningful work. You weren’t helping people—you were actually fucking them over. It was a scam, so people either quit because of that or the pay or wanting to get away from Sean. There were plenty of places you could make 30K annually without all the stress. We all knew that. Some of us, people like me, we wanted that carrot being dangled in front of our noses: the SAE job.

He pulled me into his office and told me he knew what was going on. Sean said, “I know what you want, man.”

I sat there, leaning comfortably in the chair and listened. I wanted him to pitch me. Sean was going to have to sell me.

“I know you want that SAE job, and I’ll get you there,” he said. “But you got to keep us going. You got to. You are the next to go out. I promise. Just keep us going and it’s yours.”

It’s known as “turning someone out.”

Typically, this is when you find a girl and get her hooked on heroin. You chain her to a bed, and then you give her a little shot every eight to twelve hours. She’ll say “no” at first. Squirm. Scream. She’ll resist, but a few days into it, she’ll wait for that shot. And a few days after that, she’ll ask for it. She’ll be hooked, and then she’ll do whatever you want from that point on.

That’s what I did to Sean: I took his shot away.

I turned him out. Broke him.

Just like I knew I could.

Three months later, one of our SAEs got popped for a DUI
in Orange County. That was the sound of opportunity knocking: one of our guys getting his license suspended.

I was in my cubicle as per usual, doing my sales scam thing when Sean slapped a binder on my desk. We had become friends by that point, or something close to it, so Sean was smiling at me. This thing, a training manual, was the size of a telephone book. It contained all the information one had to learn in order to be an SAE: script, flow charts, statistics.
It was the how-to guide to making six figures out on the road as a Senior Account Executive. I had been waiting close to a year for this binder.

Sean stood over me smiling, saying, “There you go, kid,” and the floor, all the people that knew how long I wanted it, how long I had lobbied for it, they stood up and clapped. Applauded. They saw hard work pay off in a place where it normally doesn’t.

Training began.

I was put in a room with two good-looking college grads, people that had actually gone to school for this position. They looked at me like I was some sort of used car salesman: equal title, but a scumbag. A slick street kid. To them, my suit wasn’t a suit, it was a costume. I wasn’t an SAE; I just happened to be dressing like one. Yet again, I felt like I was being tested, like I had to prove myself to these two fucks and the company and whoever else. Being called a sand Canadian never really bothered me, but having my credentials questioned was another matter entirely.

There was one slight problem: I couldn’t memorize the binder.

That’s all they wanted from me, to get the script down in my head so I could repeat it on cue during the meetings. That was a big issue for me because I didn’t like memorizing things, hated reading, and was always looking for the short cut. If you told me something took eight minutes to do, I would’ve been the guy trying to figure out how to get it down to seven.

I did my best.

I flew out to L.A. to train one-on-one in the field with Trey Smith, an established SAE with the company. The guy was the “rich black man” stereotype: good-looking dude driving an SSeries Benz. He wore $6,000 suits and carried a sick-ass briefcase. This motherfucker lived in a penthouse above Marina Del Rey, the kind of place that would get any pussy wet within thirty seconds because he had such good taste.

I was looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the skyline, soaking in the view, and Trey said, “This could all be yours.”

And I thought,
Yes…yes, this is what I want. This will make me happy.

Trey was the complete Obama package, a playboy. Educated and slick, but he was also a chameleon. I learned this much when I started going to the appointments with him. If the business owner was black, he spoke black. If they were white, he spoke white. Asian, he spoke Asian.

In sales terms, this is called “mirroring the customer.”

“If they feel like they’re talking to someone like themselves,” Trey said, “they’re more likely to pay attention.”

Trey was using the same script I was, the big difference being that it sounded natural coming from him. It was like he was having a conversation that just so happened to be written. He threw in the occasional filler about going to Dodger games and vacations and stuff like that, but Trey always drew it back to that binder I couldn’t memorize.

He set the bar for what I had to become.

Within three months I was on pace to make 140K a year.

The shift over to SAE wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. I was so obsessed with memorizing the binder. Then I realized I could rewrite it, make it my own. So I chopped up the script, redrew the flow charts, and made the information user-friendly. It wasn’t a script for any SAE. It was mine, and only I could use it the right way.

Personalization was the key to my success, and just as Trey had shown me, I became the chameleon. I learned to mirror whoever was across the table, and I even began wearing glasses to look more intelligent.

During the meetings with these business owners, I’d say things like, “I’ve never seen a company thrive so much in this economy. You should be proud of that.”

Which set up for the line I’d later say: “God, I can’t believe they’re ripping you off like this,” as I went over their bank statements.

Setup. Spike.

First I told them how well they were doing, then I brought it to their attention that they were getting fucked on fees and they didn’t have to take that. I made it seem like I was the best option they had, but it was never really about what I said or the numbers I showed them. It was the show. The performance. These little business owners that ran mom-and-pop grocery stores or stripmall people—all they wanted was to sit at the grown-ups’ table with a JPMorgan associate. They wanted to feel like they were taking the next step toward the American dream. For them, it wasn’t just about starting a business, but having something they could pass along to future generations. They had an ego, and much of my sales tactics were playing off of that.

When I talked to someone, it wasn’t so much a conversation as it was me breaking them down into their base parts: their motivations, their loyalty, their willpower.

I learned a lot about my capabilities by conning other people out of
money. Capabilities that would soon come in handy for something bigger.