Read an Excerpt
The Best American Newspaper Narratives of 2012
By George Getschow University of North Texas Press
Copyright © 2014 George Getschow
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57441-549-0
CHAPTER 1
Life of a Salesman
The Washington Post
October 7, 2012, Sunday Suburban Edition
By Eli Saslow
He had always managed to find optimism in even the worst circumstances, and here was another chance: a heat advisory, 98 degrees and rising at 11 a.m., the hottest day of the year yet.
"Thank you," said Frank Firetti, 54, as he walked out of his Manassas office into a blast of humidity in early June. "Thank you," he said again. "What a perfect day to sell a pool."
He opened the trunk of his 2004 Toyota compact and changed into his selling outfit of slacks, a yellow polo and a silver wristwatch. He rubbed lotion on his face and sifted through six pairs of shoes before grabbing his Dockside loafers. His goal was to arrive at a customer's house looking "out of the catalogue," he said—no traces of mud on his feet, no worry lines carved into his forehead, no indication whatsoever that sales at Blue Haven Pools had been plummeting for five years running and that a staff of 24 full-timers had dwindled to six.
His job was to stand with customers in their back yards, suntanned and smiling, and look beyond the problems of the past several years to see the opportunities in every suburban cul-de-sac. How about a pool and a sauna next to the patio? Or a custom waterfall near the property line?
"The possibilities here are as big as you can dream them," he liked to tell customers, gesturing at their yards.
In a country built on optimism, Frank Firetti was the most optimistic character of all: the American salesman—if not the architect of the American dream then at least its most time-honored promoter. He believed that you could envision something and then own it, that what you had now was never as good as what you would have next. Since the country was founded, it had climbed ever upward on the spirit of people like him, on their vision, on their willpower, on their capitalism. But now, when he traveled from house to house to sell his monuments to American success, he sensed that spirit waning.
Most people believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. Fewer trusted banks, employers or government. Two presidential campaigns were bombarding his swing state of Virginia with messages about a beleaguered middle class and an endangered American dream.
He had been taught that success in the United States was as simple as choosing it, and that one man's hard work and ambition mattered more than elections in Washington or whims on Wall Street. His grandfather had taken a boat from Italy to Ellis Island and become a brick mason who helped build a state capitol. His father had started five businesses, each bigger than the last, until the profits paid for 10 acres in Virginia and a stable for a racehorse. He had nieces who graduated from college, a brother who lived in a mansion and a Filipina wife who was in the process of becoming a U.S. citizen.
The promise of America was embedded in the Firetti family story.
But lately Frank had begun to see fissures in that story, signs of the anxiety and doubt that had reconfigured so much of the country. The economic morass of the past five years had downsized his business, diminished his retirement savings and devalued his house. Now the effects were threatening to become psychological, nibbling closer and closer at the corners of his self-worth and his optimism.
As the summer of 2012 began, he and his family had much more at stake than swimming-pool sales or even the survival of their business. In question now was the conviction at the heart of an American family—that the future was theirs to control.
His brother had begun saying the world felt like a "tinderbox, ready to explode." His father, the co-owner of their Blue Haven Pools franchise, was speaking of this election in the most critical terms, telling Frank that "the country as we know it is as good as gone without a change." His 19-year-old son had begun building up his savings account, living in Frank's basement and studying economics at the nearby community college, in part because he hoped there would still be a business for him to inherit.
Frank, meanwhile, continued to believe the answer to his future was always waiting on the next sales call, inside the door of the next house. Always the next house.
"Just got to close this one," he said now, driving his car toward the first sales call of the day, a noon appointment in Arlington County. "Close one and we'll be doing okay."
He loved being in the car, the one place that was his alone, where he could fortify himself against stress and negativity. There was Motrin in the center console for his headaches, hand sanitizer for germs and four empty bags of pistachios, because cracking shells occupied his hands and quieted his mind. There was classic rock on the radio, because he had changed the station when the host of his favorite conservative talk show started dissecting the economy, a word Frank couldn't stand to say or hear, because he had come to equate it with "an excuse for failure," he said. There was a Bible open on the back seat, because having it there occasionally helped seal the deal with a religious customer, but mostly because Frank was an ardent believer who liked to read and annotate the book when his faith needed restoration.
He pulled up to a mini-mansion and parked in the shade, leaving the air conditioning running while he reviewed the customer's file. Four or five years ago, sales appointments had been his favorite part of the job. He was a former construction worker who knew how to build the pools he sold. There were other salesmen who rushed through their pitches and then pulled out a contract, but Frank liked to savor those first few hours in a customer's house, when everything seemed possible and he could sit with a sketch pad and interpret someone's vision.
His designs occasionally went over budget, but few customers seemed to mind. They could rely on equity in their homes and banks that were eager to loan.
"Selling is winning," he liked to say.
But now the wins came much less frequently, and customers wanted to talk more about warranties and payment plans. Many of them owed more on their mortgages than their homes were worth, and most banks considered it too risky to lend tens of thousands of dollars for a swimming pool.
Frank had tried to compensate by lowering his prices and improving the quality of his work, raising Blue Haven's rating with the Better Business Bureau from an F under previous ownership to an A-minus. He had taped a copy of a Native American poem about fearlessness to the first page of his appointment book. He had also taken to repeating an aphorism, a company goal that sounded more like a prayer when he said it now, as he stepped out of his car onto the sidewalk.
"This will be a good business if we can sell a hundred pools this year," he said.
"A hundred pools," he said again. Then he walked up the driveway and knocked on the door.
* * *
Frank's wife attributed his successes to talent, and his brother jokingly credited luck, but the truth was that Frank possessed the single quality most central to American achievement. "You've got to have that drive," he said, and he always had. That's how a mediocre high school student turned himself into a restaurant manager, and how a restaurant manager became a chief building engineer, and how a building engineer became a salesman for a Virginia moving company making $80,000 on straight commission.
He recognized opportunities and then seized them, never dwelling for too long on fears or self-doubts. He moved from one career to the next on a steady journey upward, pausing just long enough to hang a sign in the office that read, "God Bless America."
So, when his father asked if he wanted to tag along to a convention for swimming-pool salesmen in February of 2006 just to learn what the business was like, Frank answered the way he always had when a new opportunity arose.
"You bet," he said.
That's how he ended up at the Sheraton in Dallas with hundreds of other salesmen from 80 Blue Haven franchises across the country. His father, Sal Firetti, had recently joined Blue Haven as a salesman, and they spent three days spoiling themselves on the corporate expense account. It had been a record year for pool sales; there was all-you-could-eat prime rib at lunch and a specialized phone booth called a "money machine," set up in the lobby, where fans blew $20 bills and employees got 15 seconds each to step inside and stuff their shirts. Frank met two salesmen from the Manassas office, Dennis and Ted, who wore Hawaiian shirts and told stories about making $200,000 a year and traveling to the Bahamas on a company-paid cruise for salesmen who sold 42 pools or more.
"Greed on display," Frank called it, and he wanted in. He joined Blue Haven as a salesman within a year. He and his father bought the franchise in Manassas shortly thereafter. Sal was nearing 70, and he wanted to buy one more business as a legacy for the grandkids. Frank was nearing 50, and he wanted to transition from working for companies to helping run one. It was the next step up in what seemed to him like the classic American narrative. The Firetti men agreed to manage the business together, bonded by a philosophy.
"Go big or go home," Frank said.
Now, on a Tuesday morning in late June, Frank walked into the company that had become his own. Ted and his Hawaiian shirts were gone, retired to Florida. Dennis was selling for a competitor. His father was back in the hospital because of complications from an illness that left him chronically fatigued, so now Frank was mostly in charge of Blue Haven by himself. He didn't have a lot of money in the bank. After six years selling pools, he had yet to qualify for the company's annual cruise. "One guy selling 40 pools?" he said, shaking his head. "These days, they could fit that group into a canoe."
"Good morning," he said now, stepping into the office. "Anybody up here?"
His voice broke the silence and echoed off the walls. The office, once cramped with 24 employees, now felt like a mausoleum on a dead-end road in an industrial park. There were empty desks and scattered customer thank-you notes from the boom years. There was still his stepmother, a former teacher who had taught herself to keep the books. There was his earnest 16-year-old nephew, helping out for the summer in mesh shorts and untied sneakers. There was his son, Tyler, down in the basement warehouse bumping his head to rap music on an iPod and taking inventory of what supplies they had left.
Frank walked into his corner office and closed the door. He had been increasing his hours even as business slowed, believing he could work his way out by punching numbers into his oversize calculator and compiling photo albums to showcase the pools he built. The phone affixed to his hip rang every few minutes, although too few of the calls came from customers.
His father called on his way home from the hospital: Try lowering the prices again, he said.
His brother called: Hire some staff, he said. Take some risks. You're sitting on a gold mine. "A damn gold mine!"
Now there was a knock on his office door. "Yep," Frank said, and in walked Scott, his construction manager and most loyal employee. Scott was a talented builder who had worked for other pool companies, but he had stuck with Blue Haven through the downturn because he believed in the company's work. Even as its annual business dipped from 400 pools to a hundred, Frank had never asked Scott to build with cheaper materials or shortchange customer warranties.
"We've got a bit of a problem," Scott said. A storm had caused damage to one of their pools still under warranty, and it would require a few hundred dollars to fix.
"Does anything ever go right?" Frank asked. He looked up from his desk and smiled.
"Not lately," Scott said.
They stood together for a moment in the quiet office. When his family bought Blue Haven, Frank had vowed to take care of his employees. He wanted to start a profit-sharing plan and celebrate good years by taking the entire staff to the Bahamas. But now Scott hadn't taken a decent vacation in two years, and he had started cleaning pools to make ends meet. He had briefly considered leaving the business to work for the government.
"You ever think about doing something else?" Scott asked.
"Sure," Frank said. "Yesterday, day before, day before that. But deep down I still believe it will get good."
"A hundred pools?" Scott said. He had heard the refrain.
"Maybe 75, even 80," Frank said. "If we can do that, we'll all be doing real good."
* * *
At first, swimming pools were just another product that he sold: $40,000-to-$200,000 retail price; several thousand pounds of concrete followed by 30,000 gallons of water; a two-month construction headache for 6 percent commission.
But the more he learned about pools, the more he found them representative of something larger. They were carvings etched into back yards as a mark of ascent, commemorating a customer's arrival in the upper middle class. They were a signal: You had a pool, you were an American somebody. Frank loved to visit his construction sites, exchange his few words of Spanish with the crew and then patrol the area with a digital camera. The crews sometimes found it peculiar, but Frank didn't care. He wrote into each contract that he was allowed to take pictures and chronicle his creation. A black hole in the earth became a smooth bowl of white-and-blue speckled plaster, filled with water so calm and pristine that it offered a promise. Here was a place of undisturbed relaxation, of aqua blue and sandstone, a monument to luxury that could be owned. He hung photos of his favorite pools in the office and brought others home to show his wife. He wanted one.
His sister already owned a pool, a custom model with two waterfalls and a hot tub that Frank had sold to her at a discounted cost.
His brother had purchased a few pools in his life before deciding it would be better to buy a house on the water.
His father had a pool on three acres in Purcellville, where he hosted family parties and cooked Italian meals on Sundays.
About a year after Frank started working for Blue Haven, he had decided to design a pool of his own. It would be his most ambitious creation yet—the biggest pool he had ever drawn, a concept he was sure nobody had thought of before. He drew a 1,200-square-foot pool with an island dotting the center and a lazy river wrapped around the perimeter.
"I'm going to lie on my back and float in circles all day." That was his plan.
Four years later, on a breezy evening in July, Frank came home to a townhouse in Purcellville sandwiched between two identical townhouses. It had been a promising day at work—one pool sold, another just waiting on county approval—and he cracked open a beer and grabbed a copy of his old drawing from the basement. His pool was still only a plan, stored alongside the yellowed schematics for a house he had hoped to build in Purcellville. He already owned the land, but their townhouse had declined in value and their money was tied up in Blue Haven. "Someday," he said.
He grabbed another beer and carried it out to the deck.
His son, Tyler, was already there, just back from his daily workout at the gym, and Frank sat across from him. His wife, Suzette, was inside packing for a trip to visit her family in the Philippines, and his 7-year-old daughter was dancing to music videos in the living room. It was just the two of them outside, father and son, drinking beer in a light breeze as the sun dipped toward the horizon. "Is there a better night than this?" Frank said, feeling wistful.
He began to talk about the things he wanted, his hallmarks of success in America: a Harley, a new camper, a family trip to Italy and that pool with the lazy river.
Tyler responded in turn by listing his own goals, which so many people in his father's generation had considered guarantees. "Stocks. Bonds. A house. A car," he said. He had been working double shifts as a waiter to boost his savings. He wanted to pay down his community college loans before transferring to a four-year college to finish his degree.
"Those are all good things," Frank said. "Smart. Real practical."
"You can't be too safe or too smart about money with the economy now," Tyler said. "I want to save up and make the smart investments."
"You'll make them," Frank said, nodding.
"I want to have that absolute stability," Tyler said.
"You'll have it."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Best American Newspaper Narratives of 2012 by George Getschow. Copyright © 2014 George Getschow. Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
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