Prologue

Editor’s Note: This was one of the last things my father wrote, probably just before his death in the fall of 2019. It was written in longhand on pages of yellow legal paper. The handwriting is shaky.

For the purposes of this narrative, call me Henderson. Henderson Cloud. It’s a pseudonym, of course. I was outside of our sales office in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 4, 1988 when the chemical plant in Henderson, Nevada blew up. I was 15 miles away, and I still got knocked down by the blast. At the time, Henderson was an industrial suburb completely separate from Las Vegas, but now in 2019 it’s pretty much part of the metro area. There were actually Henderson jokes in the old days: “The all-night convenience store in Henderson closes at midnight.” That sort of thing. Old-timers still say there’s still a toxic cloud over Henderson.

I bring this up because there’s still a cloud over the timeshare business. You’ve seen all the clichés: the salesman in the white shoes, the high pressure, the broken promises. Still you have to understand that millions of people are enjoying their timeshares every year. It’s the people who don’t use them and can’t sell them who are the unhappy ones.

So you can visualize me, I am six two with gray hair, a gray beard, and gray eyes. I am 75 now, wife gone, children scattered. They are all prepared for my death, in fact, they are wondering what is taking so long. I will leave them a lot of money, even after the costs of burial. They don’t know about the cancer. Stage 4. I didn’t know it until last week. That’s how they say it when you are 75. Not “You’re dying” but “Stage 4.” It doesn’t matter. I have already chartered the jet to Oregon. They have package deals now: assisted suicide, cremation, ashes flung into the deep Pacific forest. I’ve already paid the $20,000; I just have to board the plane; it seems like a good deal now. So my life is all settled—what I did, who I married, how many children I had—and I am now prepared to remember. Memories, they are funny things. They are not really the truth, but they are true to me. Some things I just made up, but those fictions are true to me. And maybe I just wanted to entertain myself on a cold Tuesday night. Who knows? OK, here I go.

Why did I move to Las Vegas in 1979? The answer: a drug deal gone bad. I tended bar in Fort Lauderdale back then, and the cocaine culture had taken hold of everything. Call it a tidal wave, call it what you want. South Florida was awash with coke, and everybody had to make a decision about it, try it, stop, keep going, sell your soul and/or body to buy it or sell it. I was somewhere in the middle, doing some to stay awake on the late shift and actually selling little match boxes of it to my regular customers at the bar while I was working. It worked like this. Before I went in about five in the afternoon, I would fill a bunch of match boxes with cocaine and bring them with me to the bar. Over the course of the night, regulars would ask, “Can I get a box of matches?” In reply, I would slip each one a match box full of coke. They would either tip me the price of the cocaine or add the cost of the cocaine to the tab. It was unbelievable. To supply my regulars, I bought eight balls from a dealer in my neighborhood. We became friends, and we arranged a buy for two keys worth about $30,000 in those days. But that day I had a funny feeling that the whole thing was a setup. I packed my 1978 Mercury Cordoba and started driving. I left just like that.

I had a friend named Jay whose family owned a jewelry store in Fort Lauderdale; they moved to Las Vegas to open a shop in a Strip hotel. I stopped in Mobile, Alabama and called him. He told me it was okay to come out to Las Vegas and stay with him. So I did. Myself, my clothes, my car, and about $5,000 in small bills. That’s how a lot of people arrive in Las Vegas.

Back then, people came to this town from all over the country to start over. They were always fleeing something: imminent danger (my situation), unwanted children, difficult spouses, bankruptcy, bench warrants, lots of things. When a newcomer was asked where he or she was from, the standard reply was: “back East.” That ended the conversation pretty quickly. It was shorthand for “none of your business.”

Once you became a local, there was no longer any past or future, no clocks in life just like no clocks in the casinos. It didn’t matter whether you were poor, rich, educated or not, the only thing that mattered was how you performed today, the little 24-hour block of present time.

In 1979, Las Vegas was heaven for a single man. Things that were illegal elsewhere were legal here: live gambling, sports betting, prostitution. I remember walking into the Stardust Hotel sportsbook and looking up in amazement at the gigantic boards with the names of the teams and the point spreads. You could bet as often and as much as you wanted, horses too. There were the poker rooms adjacent to the casinos, small, smoky dens where they dealt stud. Nobody played hold ’em at that time except at the kitchen table.

Any job outside of a casino was considered to be golden. People new to town feared what they saw in casino workers: the broken lives and bodies, the dealers sullen and downcast in break rooms puffing cigarettes, the cocktail girls in skimpy costumes doling out free drinks in exchange for maybe a dollar and a pinch. People happily took jobs paying five bucks an hour not to work in casinos but to be able to go to casinos.

My career in the timeshare business started innocently enough. Jay and I were drinking at Sixes and Eights, a dark little local bar on Flamingo Road about two blocks from Las Vegas Boulevard. Those were the days before video poker when locals went to bars to get away from the lights and the bells. We started talking with a guy at the bar in a white suit who was three Seven and Sevens in and calling for more. His name was Don Lime, the first timeshare guy I ever met.

After introductions, I told Don that I was looking for work. That’s all it took. Don, Jay and I had the following conversation: “What, you need a job? Let me tell you, you can be working tomorrow. We’re selling something called timeshares, my friends, ever hear of it?” (Jay and I shook our heads.) “Oh, it’s great. They give out cash every day for first sales, double sales, stuff like that. I’m drinking on the hundred I got this morning for first sale.” I looked down at the three twenties and six singles that Don had strewn on the bar. “It’s easy money, easy money. All you have to do is give The Pitch, man, The Pitch, it’s everything. It starts like this: ‘Folks, when you want to go somewhere, you don’t buy the whole plane, you just buy a seat.’ That one works well. Sometimes I say, ‘You know, when you don’t want a whole pizza, you just buy a slice or two, right?’ Hey, Brenda, give these guys another drink, I’m buying. They tell you not to say the word ‘investment,’ but I do anyway. It’s Christmas every day over there, I am not sh------ you.”

“How does it work?” I asked.

“First, the OPC at a hotel gets people to sign up. In exchange for attending the presentation, they get a dice clock. It’s a clock with dice instead of numbers. They love that clock for some reason. Anyway, our company brings the guests in on buses, and each guy gets a couple to pitch. First we show a film, then you show them the model suites, then you try to close them on a $3,500 plan. And they buy way more often than you think. I made $1,500 last month. Way better than selling cars.”

“What are they buying exactly?”

“A Vacation License, man, a Vacation License.”

“What’s that?”

Don took a long guzzle of Seven and Seven. “It’s simple,” he said. “They get to spend one week at the resort each year for 20 years.”

Jay and I looked at each other. There was no way anybody would ever buy such a thing. Don was still sober enough to see the looks on our faces. He said, “When you explain it, no one believes it. But it actually works, guys, it works. I got the checks to prove it.”

I said, “I would like to hear more about it.”

“Just come over to the sales office tomorrow about three o’clock,” said Don. “After the last party. I will introduce you to Earl Simonton, he’s the manager for Go Away Always. Now, let’s have one for the road.”

The next day, I got started in the timeshare business. It was Thursday, September 13, 1979, my first day in a long career selling dreams one week at a time.

Editor’s Note: The following piece was in Dad’s earliest notebook dated 1982.

Timeshare 101

Many people have asked me how the timeshare sale works. So here I go with my explanation which I call Timeshare 101. Basically, people are invited to a 90-minute presentation in exchange for a gift or a free vacation. In the old days in Las Vegas, a timeshare company rented a little booth in the lobby of a casino and/or hotel. A representative of the company called an OPC (Outside Public Contact) staffed the booth. There was a sign over the booth that said, “Ask me about your free gift.” As people would pass by, the OPC would make eye contact with them and say, “Have you received your free gift yet?”...