The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich

Chapter 1

Birth of a Salesman

Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.

—Winston Churchill (attributed)

 

I was born in East Harlem in 1953. Until about 1960, Italian East Harlem was one of the Naked City's worst ghettos and the Belli (pronounced “belly”) family one of the poorest families in it. Following the race riots of 1964, the lawlessness, looting, and arson fires that decimated poor neighborhoods in cities all across the country came to East Harlem, too. Every other tenement house in our neighborhood was a burned-out ruin, and if you were fortunate enough to live in a tenement that wasn't even smoke-damaged, you can bet the building was in some other advanced state of disrepair. We lived—my mother, father, older brother, sister, and I—in a rundown apartment on East 119th Street. The small, airless rooms strung along a narrow hall like boxcars in a rail yard, baking in summer, freezing in winter.

Generations of lead paint peeled from the cracked plaster. The kitchen/bathroom was at the front of the apartment. The so-called Venetian blinds were broken before I was born and hung at all angles. The frosted glass on the bathroom door had also fallen out before I was born; one panel was covered with scrap plywood, the other with a sheet of banged-up metal. There was no seat on the toilet, no working tub or shower. I took what we colorfully called a “whore's bath” until I was 18 years old, using a sponge or washrag at the kitchen sink, head under the ...