Sneak a Peek
PROLOGUE
SHE MURDERED HER DAD AND MADE ME AN ACCESSORY
I became an accessory to murder for the first time on a Monday morning at 5 a.m. when my phone suddenly rang. As I lifted up the receiver, I could hear sobbing getting louder and louder. The sobbing was emanating from my newest relocation buyer, Missy Ann. Missy Ann was THE Yellow Rose from Texas—meaning that, with all the yellow she wore, drove, and decorated with, everyone assumed that she owned the color yellow. Missy Ann was a force to be reckoned with. She was wider than she was tall, larger than she first appeared, and her laugh was so hearty, it took people by surprise. She sported a pair of 44’s in her bra and ten gallons of yellow hair above it. Clients are wont to over share as they get comfortable with us agents, and Missy Ann had already confided to me that not only was her hair naturally yellow, but “the rug matched the drapes.” In other words, she was a natural yellow blonde down there also!
I had been working with Missy Ann for two months, and she was having a hard time deciding on a home. However, Missy Ann was entertaining to work with, and she always bought me lunch or dinner after our showing appointments, so I was being patient while her wants frequently switched to needs.
Slowly and sleepily, the phone found my ear. For the rest of my life, I wished I had resisted answering this call. No good news can possibly come from a phone call when it’s still dark out. Missy Ann’s thick husky Texas accent, sobbing and wailing, forced itself in rising crescendos into my still-sleepy ear. “Ahm sorry to wake you up. Ah had to let him go, but it was so hard. He was sooo sick! Ah just had to put him down. Euthanize him. Ah didn’t know who else to call. Ah had to talk to someone.”
The rest was unintelligible as my ear closed for business and my brain fought to submerge itself back to its dream state. The sobbing and wailing and hiccupping continued uninterrupted for several minutes.
When Missy Ann finally had to take a breath, I could only offer, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t even know you had a dog. Those darn pets—they steal your heart, make you love them, and then they die. What kind of dog was it?”
The ensuing silence was deafening, and I thought Missy had maybe passed out from lack of oxygen. Then, having recovered from her speechlessness, came a frosty, indignant “It wasn’t my dog, dammit, it was my father. He’s been unconscious for over a week now, and ah just could not see him suffer from the cancer anymore, so ah increased the morphine drip when the nurse took her break. Do you think ahm going to Hell? Or could ah go to prison? Oh, Lordy, ah’ll just die right this second if ah thought ah’d spend the rest of my life in jail. Oh, Lordy, Lordy, ah deserve to go to prison—then what’s going to happen to me in there, without my makeup or special shampoo. Ah really didn’t think about that.” And now her welcome wailing took over again.
It was my turn to be speechless. I didn’t . . . I couldn’t . . . hear any more. She was making me an accessory to MURDER, and she hadn’t even bought a house from me yet. I glanced at the clock. It was 5:11 a.m. on Monday morning—a time that still makes me cringe when I notice it. Jesus, what kind of week was this going to be?
What was it about my sales demeanor that made people tell me EVERYTHING? I didn’t want to know EVERYTHING—I only want to know how much money they earned, how much they had in the bank, and what kind of alimony they paid or received.
Don’t tell me about your affairs, your abortions, or your hatred of your spouse or ex-spouse or soon-to-be ex-spouse. And defi- nitely don’t tell me you euthanized your FATHER.
Eleven days after Missy Ann’s 5 a.m. phone call, I was chalking up some tax-deductible mileage coming back from her father’s funeral. I was smiling sympathetically to myself as I remembered how Missy Ann’s thick accent had disappeared among the family, neighbors, and friends in attendance. Even though I had never met her dad, I wanted to support Missy Ann.
After her dad’s funeral, at her desperate sounding pleading, I had taken Missy Ann to the doctor who had been primary care for her dad for many years. Dr. Earl sat across his desk from us with his thinning colorless hair combed sideways over one ear. He wore the stereotypical white medical coat, accessorized by a stethoscope draped professionally around his neck. He had pushed his black rimmed glasses low on this nose so he could look sternly over them at Missy Ann directly. There was no smile on Dr. Earl’s face or in his eyes as he advised her that her dad had died of heart failure in the hospital. He wanted her to know that was to be the official cause of death on the certificate and held out the paper so she could read it for herself.
If he expected a confession, I was ready to give him mine, even though I was only an accomplice. I was saved when Missy Ann, thick Texas accent back in place, rose from her chair to accept the paper and took Dr. Earl’s hand between both of her hands.
“Thank you, Dr. Earl, and Bless Y’all for taking such good care of my father, especially in his final days. We both appreciated it. Ah’m glad his suffering is over.” And with that, we left.
The following Friday, two dozen yellow (of course) roses were delivered to me in the office with an unsigned “Thank You for Your Time, I Enjoyed Meeting You” notecard. I have enjoyed lots of flowers from satisfied clients after closing, but flowers from a client before they buy a house are an agent’s worst nightmare. It meant that I had been spending (wasting) a lot of time with someone who never buys. It meant that Missy Ann had decided not to buy a home in San Marea and would be staying in Austin.
THREE
GRANNY BLEEP, INCORPORATED
Today was the second day at my new real estate job at Fakke & Co. I had only learned the names of a few of the thirty-one agents, and some limited office procedures. I was cautioned that the two-hour free parking along the main street in front of Fakke & Co. was closely monitored by San Marea parking police, who walked by every hour to put chalk marks across rear tires. By the third mark, you got a parking ticket instead. It was important to have clients park underneath our building off the alley, if possible, because showing even five houses took more than two hours. I hadn’t been asked to take the ‘fog a mirror test’ or had a chance to find a customer who wanted to buy or sell property. I learned that buyers and sellers are ‘never a customer, but always a client’ in my rapidly expanding real estate vocabulary.
But selling real estate would always be a love-hate relationship. We agents all loved and helped each other, and we all hated and avoided Granny and his deceptive, misleading, and (at times) downright dishonest schemes. These practices were affectionately known as Granny Bleeps (I call them Bleeps because I don’t say F—k out loud). His motto was, “I give heart attacks; I don’t get them!” When he got tripped up in what he laughingly called a ‘good plan gone bad’ scheme, we agents all rolled our eyes on the latest ‘Granny Bleep, Number ’.
What kept us all working at Fakke & Co. was that Granny had the best office location in San Marea, plus he was a master magician at advertising and inspiring us agents to get out there and make a sale. Granny made the phone ring by running newspaper ads with extremely low fake (Fakke) prices. “Steal This” as a headline made buyers walk thru the door with the newspaper in hand– and most of us took full advantage of what he generated.
He locked the office doors on Wednesdays so we would caravan the new broker listings. (Caravans, also known as Broker Open Houses or Broker Caravans, were only for us agents to preview the new inventory.) There were no computers yet, and The MLS Blue Book of real estate listings only came out every other Friday with a bad newsprint 1/2″ x 1/2″ photo and a perverse three-digit coded description instead of words for each home (twelve to a page). If you wanted to know what was new to the market in between books, and what it looked like inside, agents had to go on Caravan every Wednesday afternoon.
Grant Fakke had once been a car dealer, but should have been an attorney to save money on all the lawsuits he was continually involved in. Instead, he contributed his not-so-small scheming efforts into giving real estate agents a bad name by association. Still, while no one ever made the mistake of trusting him more than once, Granny had the top-producing office and the best agents in San Marea, one of the toniest, priciest towns in Southern California. Thursday’s lunch was coming quickly, but today was my first day, and I was still elated. Today allowed me to meet fifteen of the other twenty-three women and eight men that comprised Fakke & Co. in those early years. For the most part, these agents were an industrious crew, with their minds on their work, except for two strikingly beautiful young women named Lolly and Krista. They looked like they were going to be trouble, and I was right. My mother used to tell people that I was born looking for trouble, so these two were just my types, and we bonded immediately.
Lolly and Krista were polar opposites that were a great pairing, like salt and pepper. The gorgeous petite brunette, Krista Heinrich, was a waitress with a college degree who waited tables at the local greasy spoon. She had a lean, athletic body that looked good in any outfit—even the cheap ones she bought regularly. She never said an unkind word about anyone, she never swore, and she always burst onto any scene with boundless energy. If there was ever a negative thing to say about Krista, it was that she dressed in clothes she bought at Safeway and the local drugstore. She was working part time selling real estate and had started a couple of weeks before me. When Granny hired her, he assigned Lolly Goldsmith, the other office beauty, to be her mentor.
Lolly was a life-sized Barbie doll, the same height as Krista. She was the daughter of a famous local doctor and an art patron mother. She was a class act, born of a rich upbringing in a rich town. Her dad provided her with carte blanche on his membership account at the La Jolla Country Club, where she and her friends could hang out after school and order whatever they wanted. Listening to those stories, I surmised she had father issues like me and had tried to get his attention by running up outrageous county club bills that he never seemed to notice. After he left her mom for his secretary and cut off financial support for her and their two kids, she had to find a job.
She was a honey blonde, slender, and with baby blue eyes that stopped men in their tracks. In contrast to Krista, Lolly was always impeccably clothed from Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue and was fashionably accessorized. She drove a pale yellow Cadillac named Buttercup, while Krista drove a ten-year-old gunmetal grey Nissan. Like I said—this pair of agents were salt and pepper.
Lolly had been Granny’s personal secretary for over a year, but had been forced to start selling real estate herself only three months previously when Granny fired her to cut some of his office expenses. He also gave her a Buyer to get her started.
“I just know what’s best for you,” he had said to her in answer to her tears of protest. I was to find out later how prescient I had been with my hiring condition to never make me cry. Rarely a week went by at Fakke & Co. that at least one person wasn’t crying. Sometimes it was even a guy. But, to Granny’s credit, there was truly very little about people or making a real estate deal that he wasn’t dialed into, especially the sketchy ones.
I instantly became a mentor for both Lolly and Krista, after they learned I could help them with qualifying and finding the right financing for their buyers. Variable interest rate loans had come out about six months earlier as a solution to 16% interest rates, but everyone was afraid of them. If buyers weren’t able to buy homes, the economy of the United States would suffer. A multitude of other industries from inspections to loans to home improvement to new furnishings depended on our sales.
Having just come from owning my own mortgage company, I was well versed in how to use variable rates to help our clients buy a home. As real estate ‘newbies’ in this unsteady economic mortgage and sales climate, both Lolly and Krista were sticking close to me. Since they were experienced agents (by at least a few weeks), I was sticking close to them, also. Lolly had sold two houses that had yet to close, but she was my hero, and was to become my role model in dressing and decorum as the three of us struggled to succeed. It was Granny who started the Fab Five count when he saw Lolly alone in the office one morning and asked her where the rest of her Fab Three gang was.
Back to my first day. In a torrent of information from the Fakke agents, all at the same time, I was told where the real estate forms were kept, where to get Open House signs, how to answer the phone, and, more importantly, how to answer and then transfer the calls without disconnecting them. I was introduced to the Thomas Brothers Map Book so I could find addresses once I had some clients. About every two years, I had to get a new map book, as the worn-out pages of the old ones kept falling out and the San Marea area was booming with new construction and new streets.
This client stuff was so pretentious, to me. Psychiatrists and lawyers had clients, CPAs had clients, architects had clients—but I never thought of real estate as being high-classed or in the same league as all those well trained, well-educated professions. By the time I sold my first home three weeks later, I realized that a good, successful agent really did need to have a working knowledge in every category of the trained professions listed above.
At the minimum, I needed to have a list of a variety of experts that could be relied on for accurate information. Our clients, on average, only bought or sold a home every twelve years. They relied on us to educate them, as well as point them in the right direction to get proper legal and tax information.
But here I was on my first day as an agent, with no business cards or name badge officially marking the transformation. I had absolutely no idea of what I was doing, so I just pretended to look like what I thought a seasoned agent should look like. I sat perkily at my empty desk on high alert, scouting the horizon for a client and unwilling to admit that I wouldn’t recognize one, or even know what to say or do if I accidentally found one. It felt kind of like having a pebble in your shoe inside your nylons. It was uncomfortable, but I couldn’t take off my pantyhose in public, so I put on a stiff upper lip and tried not to limp, metaphorically speaking.
Every moment spent looking for a client was precious, since my mortgage payment was looming, and my new credit card would only cover one month. It was the biggest incentive I’d ever had (or ever HAVE had), to this day. My mortgage payment, my mother’s criticisms, and my unwillingness to fail, were the foundation of my successful career selling real estate.
Darlene was the old timer at Fakke & Co., with ten years of selling experience, although Lolly whispered that Darlene hadn’t had a sale in over a year, now. She and eleven of the women huddled together around me that first day to apprise me of the situation. They were disgruntled employees, to say the least, and I was starting to have second thoughts about my assumption that Fakke & Co. was a solid, reputable company. According to them, the roof leaked on some of their desks, the downstairs toilets overflowed continuously, and the toilet paper was always missing. Furthermore, the copier rarely worked, light bulbs were out in the steep stairwell, several homeless people that occupied the lower-level garage were constantly confronting agents and clients for money, and one of the male agents smelled bad. They were putting together a formal list for Thursday’s meeting to highlight these issues.
Lolly typed away furiously, trying to keep up with the fast flow of grievances. Eventually, on the second page, they all signed one below the other, like voter registration, leaving space for the others to sign when they came in. Under Darlene’s leadership, they were Organized Labor pushed to the breaking point, and were determined to get Granny to agree to fix every item at lunch tomorrow—or else!
I surmise, in retrospect, that had the market been better and they were earning enough money to pay their own bills, they would not have had time to complain. (Just like the rest of life, when someone explodes over a minor issue, it was because the bigger issues were too heavy to bear any longer.) I didn’t sign, of course. I hadn’t needed to use the bathroom yet, so didn’t have personal knowledge of the grievances, plus I was parked on the street and was distractedly keeping my eye on the clock so I didn’t get a parking ticket.
On Thursday morning, the sun broke through the early coastal fogginess on this, my first business lunch in my new office. The fogginess in my brain took a little longer than usual to dissipate, but I felt ready. On that particular day, I didn’t know enough to even know what I was ready for. But I was READY.
I walked with Lolly and Krista down the street to Murphys, a pleasant, pricey Old Boys Club-type restaurant smelling of stale booze and cigar smoke. The décor was real red leather banquette seating, faded carpet that always looked dirty, low lights, and lots of good food that wasn’t on the printed menu. You had to Belong in order to order off the Other Menu. By the way, the bartender and maître d’ greeted Granny respectfully. He Belonged. However, Belonging, as I found out in later years, was not synonymous with them actually liking him.
Lunch was truly memorable. I ordered the open-face lobster club, which was an Other Menu Thursday Special. The ladies, though stressed, were chatty and outwardly cheerful. The men were focused only on their food and their drinks. Everyone ordered like they hadn’t had a good meal in months (which might have been true for some of the agents). Lunch hour faded towards 2 p.m. and everyone had had a glass of wine, a Margarita, or two Wild Turkey bourbons (in Granny’s case), so our nerves had subsided.
Darlene called the meeting to order by tapping her wine glass with a knife. All eyes shifted (some expectantly, some sinisterly) towards Granny. With one last sip of wine, Darlene started with “Grant, first, we all want to thank you for buying us lunch. You’ve never done that before, but we’ve all been working really hard, and as you know, times are tough.” Then she launched directly into the list of grievances with no further preamble.
Granny sat passively. His little eyes sparkled with flashes of what I mistakenly thought was Wild Turkey, but which was, ultimately, of murderous intent, as became clear a few moments after the twenty-two grievances had been aired. I realized that everyone was holding their breath as they waited for Granny to respond. And, respond he did. He stood, slowly looked the group over one by one, then announced loudly and effectively simple, “You’re all FIRED!”
After which, he stalked out and left the almost $450 bill unpaid. (I was to find out, in the fourteen years that I worked for him, that Granny virtually never paid. If, on occasion, he did pay in front of everyone, a title company, a mortgage loan officer, or some other supplier was standing behind him to reimburse him in order to garner his favor to access his office and solicit business.)
I sat in stunned silence. Granny had just fired me. I hadn’t done anything. I hadn’t complained, I hadn’t signed the letter, and I’d only had one drink. Why did I deserve to be fired? Three of the female agents openly sobbed. As the sobbing subsided, individuals looked in their wallets for some money, but no one said a word. I had $3, not even enough to cover the glass of wine I’d had. Krista had her tips from the morning restaurant shift, so she covered for several of us. Finally, Darlene cleared her throat and said, “Okay, let’s go back to work.”
Like small children with their heads hanging low, knowing they had done something wrong, we all quietly went back to our desks at Fakke & Co. No one, including Granny, ever talked about that day again.
FOUR
THE MISTRESS OF ACCESSORIES
I was enjoying getting to know my new set of co-workers. I had never had any interest in the clothes I wore—I concentrated on cheap and comfortable. Lolly had a knack for dressing that made her look fashionable even in sweatpants. So, I started paying close attention to her appearance, as she epitomized how I thought a successful salesman should dress and act. Regarding fashion, Lolly was a walking Cosmopolitan Magazine. Her wisdom on appearance was sought out by many of us on a daily basis. She once told me that when she was growing up in her wealthy, society-conscious family, she unlocked the secret of looking well dressed—accessories were that secret.
Over the years, except for Krista, we all took note and evolved into wearing basic plain colored clothing emphasized with belts, large costume-jewelry pins, scarves, and oversized necklaces. Lolly could have written a book on all the ways she tied and draped scarves on her body.
Lolly never criticized me for a fashion faux-pas or pointed out my dated outfits. I cared nothing about clothes. I had grown up poor and wore hand-me downs from the daughter of my mother’s boss. That meant that I grew up not knowing what my own taste was, or how to shop for clothes. I remember the very first time I went to buy a brand new outfit during my first year in college. I was unable to answer the sales lady’s question about what size I wore (it was size twelve). When I arrived at Fakke & Co., I owned four pairs of shoes, including one of tennis shoes and a pair of hiking boots. I had five sets of cotton slacks and blouses, one for each weekly workday. So, when Lolly’s closet was in danger of exploding from too many clothes and accessories, in my early years at Fakke& Co., I looked forward to being invited over to shop in it. It was a win-win activity for us both: she made room for new items, and she could tactfully help me look better.
After I closed some escrows and had money to upgrade my wardrobe, I took advantage of the fact that Lolly was always up for the shopping adventures we called Retail Therapy. She accompanied me to Nordstrom and helped select clothing items that went together. She told me the Nordstrom buyers always went on buying trips together, so all the departments carried stock that complimented each other. It was important, she said, to start with the shoes on the first floor because it was easier to find outfits to go with the shoes than vice versa.
However, Lolly was a complex woman with some hidden attributes that led me to have to re-categorize her occasionally.
My first recategorization happened one Tuesday morning about six months after I started at Fakke & Co. Knowing that most agents would be there for the weekly office meeting, two armed police officers came in, asking for Ms. Lolly Goldsmith. They were as serious as a heart attack, and although Lolly came to greet them with a smile on her face, her smile quickly turned to tears as one read the Miranda rights to her as the other handcuffed her hands behind her back.
Off she went between the two policemen without even her purse or her morning cup of coffee as we all stood by with our mouths hanging open. Buttercup was parked on the street in front of the office, as usual, just waiting for the parking police to make their rounds. Everything happened so fast that no one thought to look for her keys and move the car for Lolly.
About eight hours later, right after the office closed for the day, here came Lolly, in a taxi. Her makeup was streaked by trails of tears and her hair was disheveled. It was so uncharacteristic of her to look awful that Krista and I instantly braced for the worst.
So, what was Lolly’s crime that warranted her being callously shackled in front of us all? Unpaid parking tickets. Eighty-five unpaid parking tickets, to be exact. Plus, two court-ordered appearances that she missed or forgot or something. As standard procedure, the court had issued a warrant for her arrest. The parking tickets were $40 apiece, plus the fine for missing her court appearance was $2,500 plus attorney fees. Lolly was going to have to have some big escrows close, and soon! No one wanted to tell her that Buttercup had accumulated three more parking tickets today; one for each two-hour time period that she hadn’t been moved while Lolly was gone.
Lolly morphed into the Angel-Convict in my eyes that day. That was before she revealed yet another aspect of her personality some months later
This new aspect of Lolly’s complex personality came into focus in December of my first year, when she came into the office with a thick, 8″ x 12″ plain brown envelope. She’d had a professional boudoir photographer take photos of her for her boyfriend’s Christmas present, and she wanted our help to pick out the best one. Although that type of photography began with a hair and makeup session, Lolly hadn’t needed that. She was a perfectionist with her appearance, so the stylist had not been needed.
Krista and I protectively crowded around Lolly’s desk to keep her photos private from the male agents close by. I involuntarily let out a yelp when she slid out the first one. I expected to see Lolly in typical boudoir poses. She would have bright red lipstick and nail polish, be wearing skimpy lingerie, and lying on her stomach on a bed with a seductive look on her face. The edges of the photo would be blurred to soften the mood.
Instead, out of that plain brown envelope popped a new version of Lolly that made our mouths drop open. A version that made Krista laugh nervously, and one that I always referred to from then on as the ‘Angel-Slut’. Since Krista never said anything bad about anyone, it came out as endearing instead of critical. In the top photo, Lolly was lying fully naked on her back, on a red Harley Davidson. She had one stiletto-heeled foot cocked over the handlebars for dramatic effect and wore a full-length leopard fur coat draped just so on the motorcycle, but not covering any of her important parts. It took three or four more similar photos before I blinked and noticed that she also had on giant pearl-drop earrings and different colored velvet ribbon chokers.
Lolly was, and still is, a beautiful woman, and almost every one of the twelve pictures was fabulous. Krista and I both assured her that any one of them would please her boyfriend. She couldn’t decide, so she chose two and put them in a silver-hinged picture frame that he could stand on his desk.
By the following Christmas, Lolly did not have that same boyfriend. She had become engaged to a highly successful businessman who had moved to San Marea in June. His first weekend in town found him at Murphys, where he spotted Lolly and Krista having a glass of wine. This successful businessman was used to getting what he wanted, so things moved fast between them.
Over the years, Lolly proved to be as creative in having fun as she was in accessorizing. Her other talent—one that rivaled her success as Mistress of Accessories and annual awards as one of Fakke & Co’s top agents—was hosting mega-successful parties. Her parties were elaborately staged, with meticulous attention to detail and outstanding food choices.
One Halloween, she and her new husband hosted their first annual costume party of their married life. He was dressed as a clergyman and Lolly was a pregnant nun. A few years later, it was a Valentine’s Day party with the theme of “Doomed Lovers”. Miriam and her husband won First Place when they dressed as Bonnie and Clyde and drove up to the party in a red Aston-Martin convertible holding plastic tommy guns.
Another of her well-remembered soirees was a party they hosted on a yacht in San Diego Harbor. She gave her guests a highly inventive party favor. It was a Certificate of Authenticity, showing that each person had a star named after them. It was accompanied by a chart of the heavens, showing where their star was located. I missed that party, so sadly, nowhere in the heavens is there a Nico’s Star.
Lolly was, and still is, a well-known, well-liked, and phenomenally successful real estate agent. I became a nicer, more thoughtful person by knowing her. She was a role model for many of us agents (except for the convict or the slut persona— at least in my case).
FIVE
THE MILLION DOLLAR CLUB
Missy Ann’s act of euthanizing her dad made me reflect on what I would do if I found myself in that position with my mother. I had been raised by a bitterly unhappy single mother who, I’m sure, did the best she could. What I remembered in my later life is that photos of Appalachia always looked familiar, somehow. We lived in a dirt cellar (to call it a basement would be exaggerating) of a large home where, in the winter, I wasn’t allowed to touch the dirt walls because they crumbled.
It was fascinating to watch the frost line come down the wall as the ground froze deeper and deeper beneath Mother Earth’s icy breath. In the spring, my mother’s dark blue living room carpet remnant got soggy around the edges when the dirt thawed, and moisture seeped into the carpet. There were a couple of 8″ x 12′ planks set end to end that she and I had to walk, tight-rope style, on the way to the bathroom over an especially low patch, so we didn’t get mud on our bare feet or my one pair of shoes.
My father walked out on us when I was five, never to return, and never to pay a dime of child support. My mother made so little money and never, ever had any left over, so every bump in life was a financial disaster. So, I think the natural thought progression here was to deduce that I would be happy when I had some extra money and could live in a nice house with real walls and floors like all my childhood friends.
My mother was also an alcoholic, and all her judgements, pettiness, and downright meanness were amplified after 7 p.m. She told me I was fat when I weighed 127 pounds at almost six feet in height. She was against my getting married right out of college. She was against my divorce almost twenty years later. She told me I should just suck it up and stay, ignoring the fact that I was not leaving, I was being left.
When I couldn’t find a job and decided to try selling real estate, she then focused on my recklessness in leaving the safety of a regular paycheck for a commissioned job. She conveniently forgot that the financial and real estate industries were in one of their biggest slumps ever, and no regular jobs were to be had. She refused to agree that I had nothing to lose by attempting to sell real estate while I looked for a steady paycheck job. She knew what she knew and didn’t want any facts.
My adult self has never grown past the ability of my mother to make me feel guilty or not worthy. About something. About everything. It seemed that no accomplishment was ever great enough to warrant a congratulation instead of a criticism. Somehow, she always found some tiny failing to deflate the satisfaction I might have enjoyed over my accomplishments—which were many by the time she died.
I had started at Fakke & Co. in mid-May, 1982. I had never sold a home, but failure was not an option in my mind. In four months, I jumped from a starting commission split of 65% to an 80% commission split with Granny. By the end of that first year, I was ranked the fifth top earning sales agent out of thirty-one agents. This fifth-place ranking was from selling and closing around $2.5 million worth of property (almost $8 million in today’s value) when my average sale was less than $180,000.
I had earned gross commissions of almost $60,000 in spite of interest rates hovering around 16%. (Today’s equivalent would be
$168,000 in that first seven months.) I was selling roughly two properties per month, and two years later, was averaging four per month. (My personal one month’s sales record was in June of 1987, when I sold eleven properties totaling over $6 million—an equivalent of $14 million today.) I had no secretary, no buyer’s agent, no computer, no cell phone—it was the result of grueling, old-fashioned, hard work.
But that day at January’s first office meeting, I was pretty pleased with my accomplishment. I was expecting my fifth-place ranking to quell my mom’s concerns about me not having a regular paycheck.
“So, are you in the Million Dollar Club, then?” she casually asked over the phone from 1,400 miles away. I could see another failure looming large in her eyes as I had to admit that, no, I had never heard of the Million Dollar Club, so likely was not in it.
Her chilly reply informed me that Tess Moretti, who lived across the street and was my mother’s regular drinking buddy, had a daughter who was a real estate agent in Ohio. Tess’s daughter had been inducted into the Million Dollar Club for her real estate sales. Mom didn’t really like that neighbor, and together they played the one-upsmanship game constantly in a passive-aggressive dance, frequently pitting one unknowing daughter against the other. Needless to say, my mom was mortified that her daughter was eclipsed by an unknown agent in Ohio. An agent who was a member of the Million Dollar Club, not to mention that it now gave Mrs. Moretti bragging rights for the entire year.
Mom ended the conversation abruptly by saying, “Next year, I expect that you will also be a member of that Million Club, so get to work and don’t let me down.” She left the word ‘again’ off the end of the sentence, but it was understood.
If this story had ended here, the answer to the hypothetical question I posed in the beginning of this chapter would have been ‘yes’. Yes, I would have euthanized her, too, just to get rid of her dispiriting and disparaging ways—not because I loved her too much to let her suffer, like in Missy Ann’s circumstance. However, most things look different with perspective.
My second year in real estate was a whirlwind. I had a $12,000,000 goal on a sticky note on my bathroom mirror. It resembled a thermometer, with twelve marks above the bulb at the bottom, where I filled in the milestones of each month’s closings. I worked nonstop, as only a motivated self-employed person will do, under the assumption that the Million Dollar Club was a monthly goal. It was a logical assumption since I had earned $2.5 million the prior year and heard nothing about the Million Dollar Club from Granny.
I was determined to please my mom and give her back her bragging rights with Mrs. Moretti. As a result, I have them both to thank for my incredible success that year, and for establishing my work ethic and my sales career for many years to come. I became such a high-producing agent that several of the newspapers took note, writing stories about me in ensuing years and calling me for my ‘expert opinion’ quotes for their real estate articles.
Title reps, escrow reps, termite companies, mortgage reps alike all left me notepads, pens, gift cards, discount cards, invitations to lunch, and bottles of wine in hopes of attracting some of my business. The inducements piled up on my desk during the week, as I was rarely in the office. At my insistence, Lolly and Krista regularly gleaned from the pile and distributed the rest, although they knew to leave my two guilty pleasures: anything chocolate or any bottles of red wine.
By the end of that second December, however, I had only sold $11,998,800. I was $1,200 shy of selling $12,000,000 and achieving my Million Dollar Club sales goal. I was beyond embarrassed to have to admit to my mom for the second year that I missed The Million Dollar Club award, but I had nothing that would close in time to push me over the top in this calendar year.
Desperate and humbled, I braced myself and slunk into my broker’s office with a request. I was to be the top agent out of seventy-four agents now in his growing company, but I needed a favor. A big favor. A really big favor.
I sat across the desk from my slimy shadowy broker and took a deep breath, steeling myself to ask a favor of him. Granny was famous in the real estate industry for all his sales schemes, his deceptive advertising, and the gifts (bribes) he was always extracting from mortgage, title, insurance, and escrow company reps wanting to do business in his office. This knowledge made me feel like I was sitting across from the Godfather. Which also meant that if he granted me a favor, I would then owe him. Lord only knows what I would be signing up for as an IOU to Granville “Granny” Fakke. It makes me shudder even today to look back on the moment.
I started out awkwardly by explaining my mom’s request and my need to be able to give it to her so she could be back on even footing with her neighbor Mrs. Moretti. I ended it awkwardly, also, by admitting I was $1,200 shy of my $12.0 million dollar closed sales goal, but could he at least give me the award anyway, just for my mom, just so I didn’t lose face with her and she didn’t lose face with Mrs. Moretti? I closed my pitch with, “No one at the company has to know; it will just be between us.”
Granny’s mouth dropped open as he sat across the desk, his eyes bulging in disbelief at the suggestion that he lie on my behalf. He seemed to be having trouble finding the right words. Then he did a surprising thing. He put his head down on his desk and his shoulders heaved soundlessly. Quickly, I realized he was laughing. And laughing and laughing and laughing, to the point that when he raised his head, tears were running down his reddened face.
I jumped to my feet, indignant and embarrassed and furious that I had stooped to ask a favor of a man whose duplicitous ways of running his business I detested.
“I’m sorry you think it’s so funny. I don’t; and furthermore, it’s important. I’ve sold forty-four houses this year, and the least you can do is help me out this one tiny little bit.” I turned to leave his office.
He continued to laugh and sputter and motioned me to sit back down while he regained the ability to speak. I didn’t sit down. I stood there glowering with my arms crossed in the universal body language signaling rejection, while inwardly feeling devastated.
Finally, he was able to get out, “The Million . . . Dollar . . . Club . . . . is for Coldwell Banker agents with . . . total sales . . . of a Million Dollars . . . in one YEAR . . . not per MONTH.”
I had heard stories of people who did unbelievably amazing things because no one told them they couldn’t, but this story was about me. My arms dropped to my sides as I stared dumbfoundedly at Granny, slowly comprehending what he was saying.
He continued. “Screw the Million Dollar Club. Don’t you realize you’ve set a new MLS record for total sales in one year? You sold more this year than the next four Fakke & Co. agents below you, combined!
“What’s your mother’s phone number? We both need to call and thank her.”