My

fathers dream
By Erik German

Theyve flocked from all over Long Island and New York--fresh-faced salespeople, most of them under 30--decked in dark suits and skirts, swilling energy drinks to quench the weeknight fatigue, everyone bright-eyed and super-enthused, slapping backs, shaking hands, making contacts, because these people are excited, theyre fired up and theyre aggressively looking to get ahead. On this cold night in October 2004, theyve packed themselves into a windowless conference room at the Long Island Marriott Hotel, 150 eager men and women, some seated in rows of metal chairs and others--the latecomers-leaning against folding tables in the back. Its a throng of lipstick and hair gel, loafers and panty hose, and theyre heating the air with talk. A hush settles quickly over the room when 72-year-old Jean Valerio steps to the front with her microphone. She is--in the words of several people I just met--a totally awesome individual. Valerio stands at the summit of this group of salespeople. She came tonight to share wisdom, to entice newcomers and motivate the faithful. The faith in question is this groups belief in the transformative power of network marketing. Everyone in the room has already signed on as a seller with a company called Amway or theyve been invited to do so. The company promises its sales force big money for selling consumer products like soap, make-up and vitamins and, most importantly, for recruiting an army of others to do the same. Im going to talk about a business where you can make $150,000, in your spare time, over the next two to five years, Valerio will say later in the presentation. And its going to cost you about 250 bucks. After paying to register with Amway, every salesperson receives a small cut of all the merchandise they sell and a slight percentage refund on goods they buy themselves. Salespeople also receive a bonus on all the selling done by those whom they sponsor in the organization. The serious money rolls in, so the pitch goes, when your recruits sponsor salespeople who, in turn, recruit even more. These branching, root-like networks of sponsorship, called downlines, flourish through personal connections, friendships and ties of blood. Theyre supposed to enrich everyone involved. I came here looking for roots of my own. Twenty-eight years earlier, my father signed on as an Amway salesman and worked the business hard. In the early 1980s he was a talented young writer who was good at just about everything hed ever tried, from football to carpentry to poetry. He was handsome, charismatic and, in the words of his Amway sponsor, Dad was a runner--someone with a knack for selling and the smarts to make it pay. And yet my father failed catastrophically in the business. He went bankrupt and had an absolute personal meltdown. When asked about our Amway days, as he calls them, he speaks distantly of a past self whom he regards with shame, resignation and a little bit of awe. I sought out the Amway people in Long Island to understand how the company exerted such a powerful pull on my father. How could something like this have drawn him in? How could anyone so talented give up writing to sell soap? I have come here to see if that pull might have any power for myself. And I have come, ultimately, to figure out

what could have gone so terribly wrong in my fathers network marketing career when the promises made to him, and to me, were so fantastic. In her speech tonight, Valerio will map out the basic structure of the Amway business for the rookies and offer recruiting tips to veterans. But most of all, she will exhibit herself as living, jeweled proof that Amway really works. If you want to know what the American dream looks like, she tells the crowd, you are looking at her. Americas collective aspirations are embodied, apparently, by a fast-talking, thickset woman with a run in the right ankle of her nylons. Picture Margaret Thatcher with pink lipstick, dyed brown hair and youll be close. Valerio looks a decade younger than her 72 years and she speaks with the vigor of a cheerleader. During her talk, she will describe the $1.6 million house she owns in Westchester, the luxury cars she loves to drive and the trips she takes to Hawaii. Tonight shes wearing a black-and-white checkered blazer, patent leather pumps and some serious jewelry. Both ring fingers glitter with heavylooking stones, several more rocks sparkle on her necklace and walnut-sized golden teardrops visibly stretch her earlobes. My life is a fantasy, she said with a wave of her hand. I live like most people dream. And before she says a word about the company that made her rich, Valerio does a little of what people in the business call building the dream. She chooses a nervouslooking 17-year-old in the second row and asks what kind of car he always hoped to drive. A brand-new Corvette, the teen says, quietly. A brand new Corvette. What color? Valerio asks, her eyebrows penciled on and arched high. Yellow. Valerio looks away, towards the rest of the room and repeats the word yellow. Her tone is pensive. Approving. She says it again--yellow--letting it sink in, giving everyone time to summon a crisp image of the sunny sports car in their mind. Valerio turns back to the 17-year-old and asks what he actually drives. A 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass, as it turns out. This, too, Valerio repeats and lets steep. Why dont you DRIVE a Corvette? she finally asks him. Well, he says, he cant afford it. And that happens be precisely Valerios point. He cant afford to fulfill his wish. Then she steps away from him and launches into a story about herself. Such physical movement will become a pattern throughout the evening. A practiced choreography will guide Valerio from spot to spot on the rooms green carpet as she moves through different sections of her talk. Valerios story details how she finally, at age 55, bought herself the Mercedes 560 SL convertible, white with a white hard top, that shed wanted since age 15. She paid for it all at once, just wrote the check, she said. And after she drove away from the lot, I cried all the way home because dreams do come true. This will be the sustained message for the next two hours. Varlerio represents herself as your dreams come true. She seizes on the disappointments and humiliations of lower-middle-class life--long hours away from family, crushing daily routines, un-used educations, un-fulfilled dreams--and she juxtaposes them with her own success. Most

important, she casts Amway as the instrument of that success. And for those who doubt, what can they possibly know? Theyre broke. If you came here and you were skeptical, so is everybody, she says, less than five minutes into the pitch, After awhile youll take your skepticism and put it in your pocket. And theres a lot of room--because theres no money in there. For most of this crowd, Valerio is probably right. They work at rental car agencies, they manage restaurants, theyre college students living off loans. Valerio knows this, she invites them to consider their dreams and she says Amway can make them real. As a speaker, Valerio verges on amazing. Her delivery is colloquial and fresh, as if these thoughts are only occurring to her just now. And yet even the rawest, most rousing moments in her talk exhibit a canny structure. Here she is, at the climax of the second hour: You come in cause you WANT to, you come in cause you DREAM big, you come in cause theres CARS you want to buy. YELLOW ones. And its fun because you know that one of these days youre going to have enough money to walk in and BUY the car and PAY for it--CASH. I know what Im saying is hard to handle, but its the Gods truth. Valerio stresses the key words, calling us back to the beginning of the evening, calling us back to the dream, the sunny Corvette in the mind of that first 17-year-old she picked out of the crowd. But amidst all this excitement, the only pictures emerging in my mind spring from the darkest chapter of my familys past. For a long time, the details were murky. The $25,000 of debt. The basement full of audio tapes, most of them recordings of speeches like Valerios. The frozen houseplants when the gas ran out. Mom, hawking her rings. My skinny young family loading the car in 1983 for our strange, 18-month visit to Grandma and Grandpa. Here my earliest memories begin--my stuffed pig, imaginary friends, first Christmases blend indistinguishably now with photographs and the stories of severe poverty. All of this was hard to handle but it, too, was the Gods truth. ***** Only twice have I been present when my father wept. Both times were for the same reason. I remember once when, ten years old and a fitful sleeper, I crept downstairs for a drink of water past bedtime. The staircase in our 78-year-old house was a minefield of creaks. My sister and I had spent months mapping out the noises. Descending silently required a contorted dance--perching on baseboards, stretching legs across creaky treads three at once, then shifting weight slowly from foot to foot. When I heard my fathers voice, I froze in mid-step. He was reading a journal entry hed written, out loud, to my mother. He read quickly and without inflection until he reached the part hed written about me. Dad was listing off the various things that we lacked the money to buy. His words sounded elegant and his voice was subdued, until he mentioned the shoes. At the time my church shoes were too small and, if I wore them for long, they left

the flesh of my toes creased and numb. I hated church, church functions and church clothes. I voiced my podiatric grief often. This whining was greeted with silences, and these I classed with all the other injustices that attended being small. But my father had heard my complaints. And he sobbed as he told my mother that he couldnt afford to make his sons feet stop hurting. His voice sounded like mine when when in the grip of physical pain. It was the kind of sound that rips a hole in a little boys world. The year before, Id seen my father, without a whimper, wrench a 3-inch nail from the bloody flesh of his right hand after a pneumatic nail gun he was using malfunctioned. Listening from the stairway to his extraordinary tears, I was struck by two terrible thoughts. The first was that I was a bad son, lucky to wear even ill-fitting shoes. The second was that out there, lurking somewhere, were forces that could make my father cry. They had something to do with money and they had something to do with me. Ten years earlier, those same forces were hard at work when Dad brought home his first paycheck from the magazine. He had recently graduated from journalism school and landed with a farm publication called The Land, serving south-central Minnesota. Writing was what he wanted to do with his life. This job was supposed to be his point of departure. When he stepped into the kitchen of our tiny rental house carrying his check that day in 1979, my mother sat with her back to the door. She was feeding me, 8 months old and strapped into a highchair. She was having difficulty coaxing the mashed potatoes and liver into my mouth. Dad leaned against the counter, behind Mom, watching her work. In one of his columns for the magazine around this time, he described the experience of watching his son deal with food: Erik knows he has to eat. As a matter of fact he is emphatic about eating. Its just that he has not accepted the mouth as necessarily the best avenue for nourishment. Though we point to thousands of years of human experience indicating otherwise, he enjoys the challenge of experimentation. Perhaps food can be ground directly into the brain via the hair; or maybe the ears provide a direct link to the stomach. All are possibilities he feels he must check out. Today, however, nothing about the scene struck him as funny. He stayed put, out of easy view of his wife. Finally, though, she looked over her shoulder. My fathers bright brown eyes and his easy, dimpled smile had been wiped out by strain. Mom saw a man utterly downcast. She asked him what was wrong. I got my paycheck today, he said. He stared down at his scuffed loafers. Oh, thats great honey, Mom said, then went back to feeding me. The news was far from great. The check was less than 200 dollars and Dad had done the math on the way home. No way would it cover rent, student loan payments, the car, gas, utilities and food. Everything was just costing more than expected. All the way home, Dad had been thinking: What am I going to do? How am I going to make this work? Dad made a sound that caught my mothers attention. His shoulders shook. Tears slipped down his cheeks. Im never going to make any money at the paper. Dad said.

Im going to have to do something else. They talked it over. Weighed the options. Maybe Dad could find construction work on the weekends. Perhaps my mother, though Dad hated the idea, could take some kind of job. It was an anguished conversation. My father grew up in a household where a fathers highest duty was the care of his family. Poverty was stealing his manhood away. For the remainder of the year they scraped by, clipping coupons and cutting corners. In that part of Minnesota, there was no network of natural gas lines buried underground. Instead, the gas company drove out to fill the silver, hippo-sized tanks in everyones front yard. But one month that winter, the truck skipped our house because we hadnt paid our bill. Frost lay on the leaves of the houseplants. To keep from freezing, Mom and I stayed with friends across town. Dad wrote a column about it, jocularly describing the strangeness of tooling around inside our house wearing insulated coveralls. The headline writer at the magazine regarded the situation less humorously, it seems. The bold letters above his column read: Our reporter discovers a cold reality. Mom found a job waitressing the graveyard shift at Embers, an all-night diner in town. Before shed met my father, Mom had nearly been hired as a Rockette-style dancer. Shed missed the final cut by being just a few inches too short. She had green eyes and thick hair the color of burnished copper that hung to her waist. She was the loveliest woman my father had ever met and, it seemed, the manager at Embers felt the same way. He harassed her constantly. He constantly made sexual advances, touching her, asking to borrow her lip balm. Thats the closest Ill ever get to your lips, he would say. My father hated him, and he talked about smashing his face in. But we leaned too heavily on Moms paychecks to risk a confrontation. Towards the end of a difficult year, someone they trusted, my uncle Jack, called them up with a business opportunity. He asked my dad if he kept his eyes open to making more money. It would only take up an evening or two per week. It would make them an extra hundred dollars a month, possibly more. It was called Amway and in two to five years, it seemed, some people had even made this thing churn out six-figure incomes. ***** Its Halloween night, 2004, just after 8:00 pm in Floral Park, Long Island, and a rookie Amway salesman, David Venezian, works the phone in the basement of his sponsors house. He is mastering the art of contacting. Under his sponsors supervision, Dave will phone a long list of friends and relatives and, with practice, he will learn to deliver the very same pitch that drew my father into the business. Dave, 25, has spent the last four years working for an Enterprise rental car agency. Just weeks ago, he registered at the bottom of the awesome Jean Valerios Amway network. He is tall and fit, with bright brown eyes and close-cropped sideburns. He wears the same sneakers, stone-washed jeans and bent-billed cap that likely clothe most of the former fraternity

brothers he will call tonight. Im green, he says of his inexperience with Amway, But I have a big dream. He aims to make enough money so his mother, with whom he lives, can retire early. Paulie. Whats going on, its Dave. Not bad and you? Dave paces behind a coffee table, holding the cordless phone to his ear. You got a second? All right let me tell you why Im calling, man. You know when I was talking to you the other day about the, ah, internet business that I was involved in? Daves sponsor, mentor and the owner of this house--Stephan Pickman, 41--leans in close and whispers what to say next: Say: if he keeps his eyes open. Pickman works as a mortgage banker part-time but focuses all his spare energy on cultivating under him a growing network of 100 or so salespeople like Dave--who takes Pickmans suggestion and runs with it. I wanted to know if you kept your eyes open to making more money, outside of what youre doing. Dave waits a beat. Then his eyebrows shoot up. You DO, he says, glancing enthusiastically at his sponsor. We need to get together-- Pickman whispers. Yeah, well I think we need to get together and let me show you exactly what it is that I do, Dave has stopped pacing and plants both feet on the carpet. Cant promise you anything-- Pickman says in a low voice. And I cant really promise you anything, Dave repeats into the phone, but if youre interested, well shake hands and Ill take you to the next step. The conversation meanders a bit. It seems that Daves friend may be begging off a meeting. Pickman looks down, scrutinizes a sheet of notebook paper covered with Daves handwriting. This is the list that Dave, like every recruit, must make upon joining Amway. It contains the names and phone numbers of every acquaintance, friend or relative Dave can scrounge. Pickman reads it like a map of his financial future, looking for people they havent yet tried. Pickman has the profile of a comic-book hero--square jaw, strong nose--and the muscles to match. Ten years ago he was a competitive power lifter and the bulges in his beige sweater suggest that he hasnt lost the build. Its likely that he met Dave at the gym where he exercises 4 days a week. Its one of his many places he trolls for prospects who may be responsive to what Amway calls The Opportunity. In the 25 years since my father sold for Amway, the companys line of products has expanded to include energy drinks, health supplements, clothing and even electronics. All of this is now available on line and, rather than distribute themselves, salespeople can simply steer traffic to their personal Amway websites. The lighter logistical burden allows the business to be reduced to its essentials--a network of people united by their collective dreams of wealth. The Opportunity has little to do with products. From the beginning, Pickman describes Amway to me as a way of recruiting others to work as hard--or harder-than yourself, steering traffic to the websites and, of course, recruiting even more. Dave hangs up the phone after a productive conversation with another friend, a doctor named Chris, who has just agreed to come to a meeting next week. Hes going to bring two of my other fraternity brothers, Dave says.

Fantastic. Dude, you do understand how quickly this thing can exponentially grow, right? Pickman is leaning forward in his chair, pressing his palms together. Pickman speaks forcefully, clearly and appears to be a good teacher. His group has achieved a sales volume that the company calls Platinum Direct, just above the level my father briefly sustained before going broke. Steve, you dont even have to explain that to me, Dave is an eager pupil, brimming with his sponsors reflected enthusiasm. Pickman then turns his pale blue eyes to me. All evening long Ive suspected that the reason he allowed me to perch on his couch--taking notes amongst his inspirational plaques, weight-lifting trophies and shelves of motivational books--is that I am, like every human on the planet, a potential member of the ever-burgeoning Pickman Power Team. It grows like geometrically, Erik, like exponentially, he says, You know like two turns to four turns to eight turns to 16 turns to 32? Pickman sweeps his hands in circles, towards me then back to himself, as if hes laying each of these numbers on the coffee table between us. Later that week, Pickman will tell one of Daves prospects just how lucrative this kind of duplication is supposed to be. You find three people that want to make money in this thingthat listen to you and stick with it, youll make $150,000 a year, he says, Find six, youll be wealthy. Nine, youll be a multi-millionaire many times over. The more people under you in your group--and the more layers of sellers working beneath them--the greater the percentage of the profits Amway will share with you. Once your organization reaches a certain size, it supposedly become self-sustaining and the money will simply roll in perpetually. It is, Pickman promises, A repetitive, permanent, progressive, residually-based income. Work once, get paid forever. What Pickman fails to discuss are the incredible odds stacked against anyone who hopes to make that kind of money. According to the fine print on the forms every Amway salesperson signs, two thirds of the people registered with the organization make, on average, $115 per month. As for the other third, the vast majority make even less. Salespeople throughout Valerios organization--including Pickmans downlines--are encouraged to buy a freestanding flipchart to hold up while sharing the Opportunity. The chart shows photos of luxurious Amway-financed lifestyles and textual cues to jog sellers memories as they give their pitch. The flipchart also displays some extremely fine print at the bottom of the average yearly incomes page. The text says these incomes begin at $45,592 and top out at $746,122. Far below these numbers is written a tiny list of percentages. These percentages tell you how many people in the North America actually make the big yearly incomes. In the $45,000 range, its about .1457 percent. At the $700,000 level, that number shrinks to .0024 percent. Adding up everything in between yields a little over .6 percent. That is--according to the promotional material--six people in every thousand sellers actually make anywhere near the kind of money that Pickman talks about. No one who pitched Amway to my father ever mentioned these odds. No one I talked to ever did, either. I actually had to stop a presentation in progress in order to

squint, read the numbers off the chart and then copy them into my notebook. In a memoir chronicling his time as an Amway salesman in the 1980s, Stephen Butterfield writes that at least 2,038 new active people must be brought in, trained, motivated, programmed and supplied in order to become a Diamond in the organization-the sales level of the awesome Jean Valerio. Generating an income close to hers requires building an organization the size of a small town. For those looking to get rich, local populations saturate quickly. To give you a quick idea, take the most optimistic recruiting scheme Pickman pitched to me on Long Island: each person in my organization manages to sponsor nine people below them. Thered be nine recruits under me, then 81 below them, then 729, and so on. Before you reach a dozen layers of recruits, the number of people in the organization exceeds 31 billion--nearly five times the population of the earth. Even Pickmans most modest recruiting model--where everyone sponsors just three people-overtakes the population of New York City in just 13 layers. Although Amway could do a better job with disclosure, theres nothing evil about long odds. People bet on them all the time. Only a few people strike it rich in most businesses. The trouble is explaining why so many Amway sellers, like my Dad, actually end up losing money. In 1982 the Wisconsin attorney general investigated the tax returns of Amway salespeople in that state and found that, on average, the Amway sellers lost $918 a year into their businesses. At the end of the evening, the final exchange between Pickman and Dave offers a clue as to where such losses come from. Just before he went out the door, Dave paid his sponsor $6.90 for a compact disc entitled Inviting Approaches. This CD was a recording of someone higher up in the organization--offering a how-to seminar like Dave had just sat through, or perhaps a recorded, high-octane pep talk like Jean Valerio gave at the Marriott. Either way, there will be another one for Dave to buy next week and another one after that. There will be books, too. One a month, every month. None of the money from the sale of these motivational tools, as theyre called, will ever make it to Amway. They represent a network-marketing shadow economy. They are very likely the reason why Jean Valerio is rich and they were certainly the reason why my father went bankrupt. ***** My uncle Jack couldnt have pitched Amway to my father at a more perfect time. Dad was falling further behind the bills each month. For dinner each night Mom either made potatoes or some combination of eggs and cheese that we hadnt yet tried. Dads dreams to write looked bleaker as each paycheck failed to stretch. Dad jumped at the chance to make money fast and he joined Jacks downline. For the next several months, Dad wrote for The Land magazine during the day and then, at night, he began sharing the Amway Opportunity with people living in the small Minnesota towns surrounding ours. My father excelled at the interpersonal dimension of Amway. Meeting people, learning about their dreams, communicating his enthusiasm to roomfuls of their friends

and relatives--these were skills for which Dad was hardwired. My fathers sensitivity and charm quickly begat for him an Amway downline with over 100 members. Even now many of them recall Dads charisma when working a living room full of prospects. He was all uplifted and hed get the room excited, remembers Dave Strenge, 51, who ran a snowmobile dealership when Dad sponsored him in 1980. He was jumping all over the floor and he laughed a lot and made people just dream, Strenge said. He was good. Add to this my fathers looks--six feet tall, well-muscled, dark curly hair, bright brown eyes and, of course, the dimple--and you had a man to whom it was hard to say no. If anyone had a shot at gathering and motivating enough people to reach the tiny summit of top Amway earners, it was someone like him. As his first year in the business drew to a close, Dads growing dedication to Amway began to threaten his position at the magazine. To rise above the merely adequate, journalism often requires a willingness to dig for stories off the clock. But my father began spending all his free moments prospecting for Amway recruits. In the evenings after work Dad taught his people how to share the Opportunity with their friends--just like the basement lesson I saw Dave, the eager young recruit, sit through in Floral Park. After such mentoring sessions, Dad frequently worked into the wee hours fetching loads of soap and other products for his downline, arriving red-eyed and spent in The Lands office the next day. Despite his exhaustion, my father remained easily the best writer at the publication. Love colors my judgment, certainly, but Dads carefully wrought prose seems to stand out amid the newsprint like paintings on a wall. Someone at the magazine must have shared my sentiment because they tried to renew Dads focus with a sweetened ultimatum. The head editor was leaving and she offered my father her job. But before assuming the helm, so the deal went, Dad had to recommit himself fully to the magazine. He would have to work harder, longer hours . Above all, the editor said, he must taper back this Amway thing. For his renewed commitment, the magazine was prepared to offer my father an additional 25 dollars a week. The raise would hardly have made a dent in the bills we failed to pay each week. We owed the gas company money again. And the electrical company. And the U.P.S. man had come to collect on the credit account that Dad had set up to ship Amway products. The oven in our kitchen was still broken and fixing it would cost $80. If he did nothing but save the extra money, it would still be a month before Mom could quit making bread in coffee cans. When the magazine editor made the offer, Dad thought, You bastards, for this you want my full attention? He quit the magazine that day. He scoured the paper and took the first job he could find--selling used cars. The car lot paid better than journalism and allowed him to devote free time to Amway. Strangely enough, Dad actually considered this to be a choice that moved him closer to his dream of being a writer. His move was not as paradoxical as it sounds. In most cases Amway sponsors motivate recruits by encouraging them to work towards some concrete symbol of wealth. When the awesome Jean Valerio exalted the yellow Corvette during her speech at the Marriott, she epitomized the technique. But if a recruit has more abstract life goals, a

creative sponsor tries to motivate them by casting the Opportunity as a bridge to financial freedom. Once a seller crosses into the ranks of the rich, so the pitch goes, then theyre free to pursue whatever goals they want. Michael Pratt, an organizational psychologist who has spent much of his career studying Amway, calls this technique masscustomizing dreams. The pull of these dreams is both simple and powerful, writes Pratt, in an ethnographic study of Amway he published in 2000. How could you not be enthusiastic about what you want most in life? Pratt spent two years as an Amway salesman, researching how the company motivates its members. His study gave me the first satisfying account of how Amway could pull in someone like my father. Pratt concluded, in essence, that Amway carefully exploits the gap between a recruits current and ideal selves. The rhetoric of the motivational literature, the imagery of speeches, the message of the basement sales pitches are all crafted to underscore the difference between who a person is and who they want to be. Amway attempts to create a type of nonreligious seekership, Pratt writes. It creates a type of identity deficit or a misfit between who one is and who one wants to become. Such deficits are especially potent when people are in a state of crisis. There in a social scientists polysyllables, lies a blueprint for hijacking dreams. The worse a persons financial straits, the more effective the technique is. Like the Amway sponsors I met on Long Island, my fathers Amway recruiters encouraged him to examine, rigorously, how his current job failed to fulfill his dreams. For my father, the same age I am now, looking at his wife--hollow-cheeked from the sparse meals and worried sick about rent and bills and down to 98 pounds because she pushed most of the food on Erik-facing this poverty daily no doubt encouraged in my father just the sort of seekership that Amway required. To my Dad, the Opportunity began to seem like the only way available to marry his dream of writing with his responsibilities as a man. In the back of his mind was the idea that, one day, he could write free of financial worry. My father wasnt selling soap, he was selling the idea of the man he desperately hoped to become. ***** Dad pursued this dream fiercely. On average he either shared the Opportunity or helped someone else show it every night of the week. On weekends, he did so several times in one day. The requirement that a salesperson work their Amway business nearly every day--a dictum that flatly contradicted the modest estimates of the introductory pitch--was shared with recruits only after they had become sufficiently invested to accept the demand. Despite his relish for the work, my father couldnt seem to make it pay. Dad followed the program precisely. He attended seminars--which cost $5 for weekly meetings and ran into the hundreds of dollars for the huge seasonal rallies held at out-ofstate hotels. My father also studied the books and instructional tapes flowing down the chain of sponsorship. Every month a $6 book came in the mail and every week a $3.50

tape arrived. Dad was told that these tools gave a salesman the motivation and knowhow to be successful. The tools were not produced by Amway. They were a separate business, run by salespeople higher up in the organization. Profit margins on these materials were much higher than on actual Amway products. Two years into the business, Dad and my uncle Jack later learned from their upline Diamond--the salesperson who, like Jean Valerio, stood at the top of their organization that the tapes cost just pennies to make. So my father and Jack started duplicating a few of the tapes and distributing them for free to their downline, hoping save everyone a little money. The salespeople above Jack and Dad in the organization went ballistic. They threatened legal action. It dawned on my father slowly that the upline Diamonds were funding their lavish lifestyles with profits from motivational tools and functions. Members of Dads downline remember being put under intense pressure to buy books and tapes from those at the top of the pyramid. They keep sending you one a month, then its two a month, then its four a month and you dont dare give them your credit card number, recalls Daryl Simon, 58, who joined Dads organization when he was teaching high school in New Ulm, Minn. There was a lot of pressure, Simon remembers. My wife and I thought boy these people are really scamming us. The motivational texts and recordings professed, relentlessly, that anyone could get rich by working hard, by never giving up and by duplicating, exactly, the behavior of those above them in the organization. Besides sharing the Opportunity and attending all Amway functions, the behavior that sellers like Dad were most encouraged to duplicate was investing in the business. This meant buying lots of products, books and tapes to keep on hand for your downline. Neither Dad nor the people in his downlines were selling much soap. Higher-ups in the organization emphasized buying books and tapes and, above all, sponsoring more people to do the same. As a sponsor, Dad didnt simply buy tapes for himself. He bought them by the box load for those hed sponsored in his organization. Once Dad learned where the profits went, he began to lose his taste for pushing the motivational tools on his downline. But hundreds of tapes had poured into his house each month from those above him in the organization--tapes which he had bought and could not sell. Thats where he got royally screwed, recalls Janice Wagner, who joined Dads downline to supplement the income from the grain elevator she ran with her husband in Judson, Minn. He bought all those tapes and the downline just couldnt buy them. Dad began borrowing money from friends, relatives, and the local bank to keep up with the expense of running his business. He found a third job stocking grocery store shelves at night. This ushered in what he remembers as the most grueling period of toil in his life. From midnight to 8:00 in the morning Dad stocked shelves at the store. After grabbing an hour of sleep in our two-door mustard-colored Pacer, he drove to the dealership to sell used cars all day long, until 5:00 p.m. Some nights he made it home to eat with the family. After dinner and well into the evening, Dad worked the Amway business, sharing the Opportunity or teaching others to do so in basements and living rooms all over the state. Still there was no money.

One night, after six months of this maniacal, crushing routine, Mom found my father tearful and incoherent in the kitchen. At this point the debt had mounted to $25,000. The family had an empty gas tank out in the yard, an empty gas tank in the car, empty cupboards and an empty bank account. It was a final culmination of bills due and no money to pay them. A week or so after Dads breakdown, my paternal grandparents visited us. Their excuse for coming was delivering a dining room table, since our family had been eating for the last year off of a wobbly fiberboard card table. My fathers parents stayed one night and planned to breakfast with my parents and then leave. At my grandparents house in Nebraska, breakfast with guests was a massive affair. Grandma scrambled heaps of eggs and flipped stacks of pancakes and poured pitchers of orange juice and, of course, she delivered plate after plate of bacon to the table, still sizzling on paper towels translucent with grease. At our house, on the morning of their visit, breakfast was oatmeal. The fathers and sons ate heartily, Bob, Roger and Erik each silently digging in to his plastic bowl of wet starch. The mothers, Dominique and Lorraine, drank coffee. My mother remembers that, finally, my grandfather cleared his throat. He talked softly. Grandpas tone was diplomatic. Respectful. He spoke in the manner he used with customers at the grocery store he ran. He talked about how tough it can be to start a family. The work pays less than you expect. The money doesnt stretch as far as youd like. He told the story of how, in the beginning, he and his wife had lived with his parents, Rogers grandparents, for a short while until his young family could gain their financial footing. The set-up hadnt been perfect, but it had been necessary. And no one thought less of them for it. Rog, he said to my father, its nothing to be ashamed of to be in a situation where you need a little help from your parents. My father spoke then, as frankly as he ever had about how dire the situation had become. This might not be a matter of just getting on our feet, he said. Weve pretty much lost our shirts. Theres a lot of debt. How much?, my grandfather asked. Dad let the question hang for several long moments. My mother remembers interrogating her husband about this for months. He had tried consistently to protect her from the real answer. Still waiting, she glanced out the window. A tiny Lutheran church, sheathed with white clapboard siding stood across the road from the house. A red neon cross had been mounted high on the steeple. The glowing red tubes flickered day and night. It reminded her, she says, of the lurid beckoning signs in a red light district. Ever since shed moved in, she thought the neon cross was a thoroughly embarrassing vision of salvation. Finally, Roger spoke. We owe about $25,000, he said quietly. It was for this man, at this time, an impossible sum. My grandfather finally allowed himself to lay out the invitation hed driven 285 miles to deliver. Come back home, he said.

A week or so after that, my parents loaded the possessions we hadnt sold for cash into our car and moved into my grandparents basement in Pierce, my fathers Nebraska hometown. We lived with my grandparents for eighteen months, with both of my parents working constantly to pay off debts. After we moved out, my father found work as a remodeling contractor and gave up journalism for good. ***** The home of the awesome Jean Valerio sits on a wooded side street in New Rochelle, a wealthy Westchester County suburb north of New York City. Viewed from the curb, its a modest-looking house with light blue siding, limestone accents and a steep asphalt-shingled roof. Low-profile skylights hint at a second story. Only the U.S. flag posted by the driveway suggests that this structure represents, as Valerio has said, the zenith of the American dream. On this sunny Saturday afternoon in March 2005, Ive been invited inside for a firsthand peek at the place where the dream is housed. Though I havent put it to my host explicitly, Ive come also to make a final accounting of my fathers doomed Amway career. I want to see the terminus for all the money that sellers like him spent on tapes, and I want to see just what kind of lifestyle those profits buy. Im seated at Valerios kitchen table, sipping coffee, bursting with questions--about books, bankruptcy and hijacked dreams. But the awesome Jean Valerio wants to talk about success. The Diamond-level saleswoman sits munching on a graham cracker, occasionally checking her gray sweatshirt for crumbs. The interview begins with questions about her past, and Valerio slips easily into the well-worn autobiography she shared during her speech at the Long Island Marriott. This narrative has provided Valerio with a bridge to many strangers before, and I am no different. She warms to me quickly as she describes growing up as the poor daughter of a taxi driver, first in Harlem, then in the Bronx. She tells how she worked 32 years as an insurance broker and she talks me through her two marriages. Always, she had trouble making ends meet, she says. When speaking of her former poverty, Valerios voice drops into a low, intimate register. Never did she think shed be rich. But her magic moment came at age 47, she says. That was when Valerio was sponsored in the Amway business. Within 26 months, she says, she was able to quit her other jobs and her dreams came true--all because of the amazing opportunity she continues to share with people today. I grow more anxious as I listen. Valerio has granted this interview on conditions I intend to violate very soon. I told her on the phone that Id seen her speech, that my father was once involved in the business, and that I was writing an article about Amway. She became immediately wary. She was skittish, she said, about journalists with agendas. Shed been ambushed on camera in 1994 by an American Journal reporter doing an anti-Amway expose. I told her that my father bore Amway no ill will. And this was true. Neither my father nor my uncle Jack, his sponsor, will say a bad word about the company itself. They blame their problems on the mis-marketing of books

and tapes by the Diamond-level salespeople at the top of the pyramid. They took a marketing method and wrapped it around the books and the tapes, says my uncle Jack, who quit Amway a year after my father and now runs a corporate hog farm in Iowa. It took all the money people were making and put it into the tapes, books and seminars. But, he added, If you write a story on this, you should not damage Amway. It isnt the company. Once assured that I didnt come from a family of Amway-haters, Valerio agreed to an interview--provided that I didnt ask about her income. Income--especially her profits from the books and tapes--happened to be one of the only subjects I really wanted her to address. But at that point I kept quiet and told Valerio she had the right to declare any question off-limits. As I sit in Valerios kitchen on that Saturday afternoon a few days after that phone call, I grow impatient with her re-told tale of success. My eye wanders past the brighteyed, grandmotherly saleswoman and settles on the speckled granite countertops behind her; the two toasters; the massive Whirlpool refrigerator; the small appliances I cant even identify; and, finally on the collection of dinner plates arrayed on top of her cupboards. Each plate displays a different Norman Rockwell painting, making it possible, in this house, to literally eat off of that artists vision of the American dream. I begin to steer the conversation towards money. Finally I ask, quietly as I can, what percentage of Valerios income comes from selling motivational tools to her downline. Thats very hard to say, Valerio says quickly. Thats VERY hard to say. If you had to take a stab at it, though, is it one percent? I ask, trying to sound casual, a little disinterested. Is it fifty percent? Is it, you know-- I dont want to give you number, Valerio cuts me off, pressing manicured fingers on the tabletop. I swear to god I dont. Because it changes. My uncle Jack told me that one Diamond-level Amway salesman that he knew made at least half of his income by selling motivational tools to his downline. Ruth Carter, author of a memoir chronicling her 13 years in the Amway business, says the percentages climb even higher than that. She managed the office of a Diamond-level seller at the top of her organization and she saw firsthand where his profits came from. His bonuses from Amway amounted to less than five percent of his total income, she writes, The other 95 percent came from motivational tools and functions. For her employer, Carter says, Amway was just a front for the sale of motivational tools and functions. When pressed, Valerio insists that her income from motivational tools fluctuates constantly. Sometimes she sells a lot, she says, sometimes none at all. She says that her only stable profit comes from her downlines sale of Amway consumer goods: soap, vitamins and the like. She begins to make it sound like profits from the tools business cant be measured at all. Just so Im clear, I ask again whether Valerio doesnt actually know the source of her income, or if she simply refuses to say. I dont want to say, she answers finally. Just before the end of her speech at the Long Island Marriott, Valerio made a promise to the crowd of Amway sellers gathered there. We want you to know everything

that we know, she said. There is not a secret in this business. Not a secret. I decide to tell Valerio my own secret, in hope of clearing the air a little. I describe Dads spiral into penury, the houseful of tapes, the forced move back into Grandma and Grandpas house. This, I tell her, is why Im so curious about the income from motivational materials. Dads story arouses Valerios sympathy, but not her candor. She says shes never heard of anything like that happening in her organization. Nobody would suggest that you have a houseful of tapes or books, she insists. Valerios gray-green eyes are open wide. She appears genuinely appalled. She offers to fly to Nebraska to meet my father and reintroduce him to the business properly. But how do you explain what happened to him, I ask. Valerio offers only the possibility that Dad fell in with a bad group. This is a wonderful business. Its pure, its wonderful, she says. The only thing wrong with it? Valerio pinches another graham cracker from the box and pokes it at me gently. It has people in it. And they bring in their own characteristics. And sometimes theyre not so swift and theyre not so good. Sometimes theyre out to see that theyre going to make a buck. Because Amway sponsorship requires close mentoring, particular sales networks tend to take on the character of their founders. Attitudes and techniques are passed down the chain of sponsorship. My father and uncle had joined a famously aggressive group of Amway sellers, headed by a charismatic salesman named Dexter Yager. The Yager organization--or at least the branch of it my family joined--placed a huge emphasis on recruiting and almost none on selling products. Jack remembers that the group had a lot more wow factor than other organizations, but higher-ups explained almost nothing about where profits came from. Jack said that Yager was moving two semi-truck loads of tapes a week, selling them to his downlines--insisting that the key to success was always buying more. They were trying to take a bunch of sheep and just run them off a cliff, Jack says. Valerio says that her only contact with Dexter Yager was being privileged to hear him speak twice. She insists that, in her organization, no one places pressure on sellers to buy motivational tools. As I sit at her kitchen table, repeatedly declining the same Honey Maid crackers and frosty glasses of two-percent milk that my own grandmother would have offered me in similar circumstances, I have to at least entertain the possibility that Valerio is telling the truth. Perhaps the only explanation for my fathers catastrophe lies in the greed of a few high-level sellers. Perhaps Amway, for those in Valerios organization, is nothing less than, as she says, a business that answers prayer. ***** Im far from convinced that the Opportunity is quite so benign. At its best, Amway harnesses middle class dissatisfaction for the purposes of hawking soap, enriching a tiny fraction of the sellers who buy in. At its worst, the company hijacks dreams born of desperation and bankrupts people with the very products promising them deliverance. The tension between these two possibilities is far from resolved. But Im willing to

lay it aside momentarily in exchange for a tour of Valerios home. If Amway answers prayers, I think, then Valerios house ought to be a temple. I have come here with the vague hope that seeing it will reveal, on some physical level, just what my father had been striving for. During the course of the tour, I see a bedroom reserved for a live-in maid; I count 103 pairs of Valerios shoes; I walk through a living room large enough to accommodate 70 people; I blink at my reflection in a wall of mirrors mounted inside the biggest closet Ive ever seen; and I pet a small zoos worth of fur coats. Valerio delights especially in her eight fur coats, running her fingers over each as she describes their original wearers: This is a sheared fox, she says, this is the cat lynx, this is the mink jacket, this is whatever this is, theres another cat lynx. Finally Valerio whisks me towards the final stop on the tour--an enclosed squashcourt-sized porch she calls the Hangout Fun Room, whose walls have been painted entirely pink. Its a remarkable color, hot and rosy, like sunburned skin. I lean on a twofoot tall replica of Michelangelos David, trying to fully grasp the pinkness of this room. Then comes an odd, possibly religious, instant. If it happened in a movie, critics would call it overdone. Valerios stereo, tuned to Light FM, begins playing Louis Armstrongs What a Wonderful World. I realize suddenly that this house, the purchased items inside of it, the nice cars parked in front of it--express in the deepest way what Valerio thinks life ought to deliver. This is the dream world, imagined, aspired to and achieved by someone who has made the most of their network-marketing dream. This fact shouldnt surprise me. Valerio and everyone else Ive met in Amway have conflated personal aspiration with material possession all along. The bottom line in every decision youre ever going to make is money. Bottom line, she said in her speech. And if your minister or your preacher or your pastor tells you that you cant be chasing after money, that you cant have money be the most important thing in your life--then the next time they pass the plate, you put an I.O.U. in there. But theres something deeper and more personal going on than a resigned acceptance of the worlds materialism. Valerio instantly recalls the make, model, color and year of every car she has ever owned. She remembers the price of the first car she bought ($7,200) and she remembers the brand of leather upholstering of the seats in her first Chrysler convertible (Mark Cross). She can tell you instantly what car she wants to buy next--a 72 Rolls Royce Corniche Convertible--and she knows exactly what it costs used (not a lot, maybe 17, 18 thousand bucks). When she exalted the yellow Corvette during her speech at the Marriott, its likely that Valerio was being neither insincere nor consciously manipulative. Cars--or nice houses or expensive things in general--just happen to be what Valerio really dreams about. And standing in the outrageously pink Hangout Fun Room, listening to Louis Armstrong tell me how wonderful it all was, I realized suddenly that there was a more fundamental reason why my father didnt make it in the Amway business. I have never met an adult human who is more bored by the concept of money or possessions than

Dad. He drives pickup trucks until they collapse and then buys the next best used heap he can find. If you asked him what truck he wanted next, the question would likely fail to make sense to him. He has a perfectly good truck already. In my entire lifetime, my father has owned and worn exactly three belts. They hold up his Dickies work pants until the leather stretches and frays and all the holes run together. He tends to make boot upgrades only when family members buy him new footwear and when they secretly throw his old pair away. Although my fathers financial desperation softened him perfectly into just the sort of seeker Amway requires, I realized then that the ideology of the business never really took root in him. He believed in his family and he believed in his writerly dreams, but thats not the same as wanting to get rich. The pursuit of material wealth has never been one of my driving forces, Dad told me over the phone. I had called him to mine his recollections for this story. My own ambitions to write had led me to journalism school in New York where, for a year-long depth-reporting project, Id chosen to dig into Amway. The point of the call was to factcheck, to buttress the hours of interviews Id done with Mom and Grandma and Jack in order to recreate moments 25 years old. But Id also called to confront Dad with what I had learned about the business. At the time he still lived in Nebraska, working as a remodeling contractor. He had recently begun writing again--textbooks about construction and a weekly blog on current events that is my favorite on the net. But I have always wondered how much further Dads writing career would have gone if he hadnt given up on the magazine as a younger man. Id always felt that Amway had somehow swindled him out of his ambition. Dad, as it turned out, disagreed. I cant hold them culpable, he said. Im a college-educated, reasonably intelligent guy. Im no victim. I went into it with open eyes. I still think its a good organization, he added. I still think that, correctly done, where youre moving product, it can be a good business. Like my uncle Jack, Dad said he had simply fallen in with a poorly-managed group. We argued back and forth about whether the low odds of success with Amway really constituted a scam. It was still a business where a tiny fraction of sellers with ambition and a talent for self-promotion could get rich, he insisted. Sure, a lot of people have their dreams dashed in the process, he said, but how is that different than writing? The likelihood of being successful in Amway was probably a hundred times better than with being a writer, he said. I think that good writers get taken advantage of more than good Amway people. I considered the mad scramble for jobs and internships currently underway at journalism schools, the widespread layoffs at newspapers. I considered the professions notoriously low pay. I considered how few of us would ever write for the rarified publications that had inspired us to take up pens in the first place. Our path--my colleagues, my fathers, my own--was not for the acquisitive. Which explains why, despite his talent for it, Amway fit my father so poorly. I havent ever bought in to the American dream that THINGS are going to solve my problems, he said. They tell you to tape a picture of a car on the fridge, a very specific

make, a very specific model. I really couldnt do that. Maybe from the outset I was not wired to make this thing happen. If my father had pushed harder, if--in particular--hed been willing to harass his downline into buying more motivational tools, I think he could have made Amway pay. All he would have needed was a desire for wealth that overshadowed the pain he knew hed cause his recruits. All he needed to do was exert his considerable talents to fill other families basements with boxes of tapes and he would have had an Amway career so lucrative and bustling there would have been no need for him to write. But as a reader of his recent works, and as a product of his example, I feel lucky he was the sort of man who couldnt bring himself to do it. *****

Its January 2011. In the years since I first reported this piece, Ive found a way to stay in the profession my father was forced to give up. I live in Brazil now, working alongside my wife as a correspondent for a U.S. news agency, struggling, but managing, to be a paid writer. Of those I spoke with, Steve Pickman is still in the business, as enthused as ever about Amway. He said his young recruit, David Venezian, eventually dropped out. The awesome Jean Valerio still lives in her house in New Rochelle, wholly supported, she said, by the proceeds of her Amway business. Its taken me until now to show any of this to my father. We Midwesterners prefer keeping our issues in the drawer. The exchange with Dad occurred over email, and I told him I wouldnt publish the story if he asked me not to. In the end, I dont know what I was so worried about. He remains the kind, sensitive wordsmith hes always been. Dont know that I deserve the props you gave me, he wrote back the other day. But I see nothing about the piece that rings false. I love you. Tell them to print it.