The Dream Merchant by Fred Waitzkin Page A

their fifty dollars for irons. Before the end of the night, you were back up on a stage again getting forty dollars for your fifty-dollar payout. And the tent was filled with other guys tramping up to get money. You’d surely drive home eager to tell friends about this opportunity to buy something useful for your home while earning money from this business or whatever it was. The following week—or if the meeting was large enough all this could happen during the first night—you’d get eighty dollars, because sixteen others had bought irons. You’ve actually made a nice profit for your purchase. Now you are at the apex of a small pyramid of customers, people yearning to have more. Each week you are boosted higher on the pyramid, more people supporting your future, your prosperity. And the beauty of it is that people below you, creating this cash flow siphoning upward, are at the same time atop their own little pyramids with the hope, no, the probability of enriching themselves from others who come on below them. All that each of them has to do is buy an electric iron for fifty bucks to keep the money coming. Ava and Jim would make sure that this happened.
    All your friends would surely come to buy; they’d make money and you’d make money until you got to the ultimate, the $1,260 payout, and then you’d have to put up another fifty dollars and get another iron and start all over again. And you would, right? Why stop now? Who wouldn’t be game for these meetings with rock and roll and this beautiful woman, very sexy though a little preoccupied, passing out money, tens of thousands? She’s just giving it away. Who wouldn’t want to come to such a meeting?
    This was Marvin’s idea. Basically, he was selling an illusion.
    Who’s counting how much we’re giving away? How much we’re keeping? he asked Jim and Ava. They’re gonna want the money in their hands, he said, licking his lips and glancing at Ava.
    *   *   *
    The music rose for a time, drowning out Jim’s entreaties, and Ava clapped to the beat, shook her chest boldly. For the moment she had stolen the scene while the music swelled the tent with hope and anticipation. Then it was his turn, talking about hardship, growing up dirt poor, not bathing, not eating, freezing in the winter because Daddy made bad choices or no choices at all. Daddy was paralyzed and dreaming about the future, and Ava moved toward the money tree, all eyes on her slow walk; they switched back and forth, sex and privation.
    Don’t give it away too soon, Marvin coached. Frustrate them. Pull away the bait.
    Jim and Ava were so smooth. They had been doing this routine for two years. The operation was getting a reputation around Montreal. It had started out with just a handful of reluctant people meeting in a small basement room, with no music, no real pulse. Back then Marvin hadn’t worked out the intricacies, but he knew that he could make out selling electric irons for fifty bucks and giving away money—he smelled profit. Now he had complicated charts. He knew that he must cut the play off after twelve levels. He calculated that they would keep 56 percent of the dollars that came through the door. Now there were big crowds showing up for their tent giveaways. People were driving a hundred miles for irons and money. The three of them gave away more and more money each time and drove off in one of Jim’s cars—he now owned three Cadillacs!—a suitcase of dollars in the trunk, sometimes a hundred thousand or more.
    Onstage, Ava moved slowly to a large tree, a Christmas tree with money clipped onto its branches. She enjoyed being watched. She liked to make men squirm. It made her feel alive. She’d even flirt a little with Marvin, although she’d quickly turn away, he was such a pig. There was fifty thousand in cash clipped onto the fifteen-foot tree, five-dollar bills, fifties and hundreds.