Trying to impress me Jan. 15, 1986
The last time I saw John Mark was after the Great Dundee
Fire last Labor Day.
Hearing from him again this week should have warned me,
especially when he suggested I come over to his place to talk about some
money-making scheme he’s come up with. He said it would be good for me.
I’ve had my fill of people trying to sell me on schemes that
will make me vast fortunes.
A few years ago, I wrote to one company about taking up work
at home stuffing envelopes, boring but honest labor, only to wind up on a
mailing list of would-be fortune-makers, each promising me great wealth for doing
almost nothing.
Since then, any hint of such schemes sets me on edge in much
the way cult worship does, or any of the extremely fundamental religions.
I’ve been attuned to the warning signs, as any intelligent
being might.
And yet, John Mark truly believes he’s somehow above being
fooled, while trying to ensnare me into what is clearly a pyramid scheme.
In order for him to get rich, he has to sucker new recruits like
me.
The book his showed me – and later gave me to take home to
look at and study – is a model in point, full of promo statements in extremely
large print, but with little substantial fact.
I had seen its ilk before while thumbing through the
Scientology texts of my one-time roommate (he was an officer in the cult and
the books were geared towards ranking members, but still loaded with the same questionable
text, repeating the same words and phrases over and over: in this cast, rich
replacing salvation, money replacing the word of god.
I kept wondering if John Mark was deliberately conning me,
or whether he was simply taken in.
He’s always been fond of money, which is why he gravitated away
from literature to selling insurance.
In this case, he implied he had already made money from his
scheme and showed me the overly large stereo system he had just purchased,
something far too big for his small apartment, and out of keeping with his
immigrant background. The rest of his apartment seemed vacant in comparison,
sparsely furnished.
I asked why he needed something so elaborate, would not a
compact disk served him as well as a handcrafted turntable. He handed me some mumbo
jumbo about the essence of the sound like being the same, the new CD technology
did not duplicate the tenderness of the music the way a turntable did. When he
put on his favorite Mozart record, I heard scratches he claimed he could not
hear, and though the sound was good, it didn’t see worth the $20,000 he claimed
to have spent for it.
His large screen TV was also state of the art, full of clarity
and color I could not find in TVs of lesser quality.
I didn’t see the point.
John’s whole life has been about impressing people, if not
so blatantly as with possessions like these, then in the past about how intellectually
superior he was compared to everybody else, including some the professors we shared
at college.
But being there with him, I realized his life was an
illusion, a desperate effort to create the image of success. He kept showing me
check stubs for exorbitant amounts he’d made from his scheme.
He showed me a collection of leather-bound books, each with the
“authentic” signature of its author, something that would have impressed me
except for the fact that when I got home, I saw the advertisement for those
same books resting in my mailbox.
Yet all these fabulous possessions sat in a cold water flat
no more impressive than the one I lived in a few blocks south.
If he was so successful, I asked, why hadn’t he moved to
better digs.
“All in good time,” he assured me. “All in good time.”
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