Chapter 18 The Brutal Truth Nobody Else Will Tell You…
8 p.m. The telephone rang. (No, it wasn’t a ping from my cell phone. It was the telephone mounted on my wall, with the 15-foot cord between the handle and the base. You can Google it. 
) It was Jim, my partner in a struggling business.
“Hey, what are you doing this Saturday afternoon?” he asked.
“Think I’m free. Why? What’s up?”
“I might need you to protect me…”
Not knowing Jim to be the needy type, I said, “Protect you? From what?”
“Well, I was at a gas station filling up my car today, and the guy on the other side of the pump started talking to me about making money. He’s coming over to show me something. I want you there to protect me, because I think it’s Amway.”
“Amway? What’s Amway?” I wanted to know.
“You don’t know what Amway is? It’s that thing where they draw all those circles about making money.”
“Jimmy, I don’t know anything about circles or Amway. But if it’s about making money—we need to make some money!”
That fateful Saturday arrived. The guy sat across from us at Jimmy’s kitchen table, reached into his briefcase, and produced a yellow notepad along with a red pen. He drew a circle at the top of the page, and in that circle, he wrote “you.”
Under that circle, he drew five more. And under those, 25 more. And then 125 more. And then…
I started hallucinating. As a high school dropout with limited educational background, ...
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