When I was twenty two I answered an ad on Craigslist that changed my life. “Do you like cool people and love art? Do you want to work at a fast growing company with unlimited earning potential? Apply today. FUN PEOPLE ONLY!” At best, I was naive for having responded.
That same week I went in for a job interview at the company’s headquarters in Orlando. The office manager greeted me in a stylish lobby and had me fill out a form that asked about my favorite kind of art, and what kind of car I drove. She showed me across a hallway to the owner's office. “He’ll be right in after the morning meeting,” she said, and left before I could get any questions in.
Framed concert posters and golden awards hung across the walls. Travel photos of a guy with white hair and a deep gaze filled the large desk. “Hey dude, what's up?!” the man from the photos said, as he walked in with an english bulldog that looked like his twin. He greeted me with a warm smile. “Let me show you around.”
He led me to a showroom where reproductions of nature scenes, surrealist works and vibrant abstracts covered the walls. Passing through industrial doors, we entered a factory buzzing with people. “We manufacture framed art for homes and offices. We make them here and sell them out of our branches across the country. Pretty cool right?”
“So people come here to buy?” I asked, “Sometimes,” he said and gave me a vague description of the job. “First you’ll work with a manager before going out on your own. When you get good enough, you’ll teach others and build your own crew. When can you come in for training?” he asked, looking me in the eyes, smiling and bopping his head.
I told him I didn’t have a green card yet, and that I would need to take time off often to pursue music. I’ll never forget his response. “I don’t care. You can start tomorrow.” He was cool, the kind of white guy you’d want in charge if there had to be a white guy in charge. I was ecstatic.
It was the first job I got in the US after moving from the Dominican Republic. There was no salary and no hourly pay but I needed money and I needed the flexibility to tour. This checked both boxes.
Getting the fuck out of the car
As I drove to work on my first day, I freaked out and pulled over right before a major toll road called the Florida turnpike. What the fuck is a turnpike!? What the fuck am I doing!?
I called my cousin Stephen from the shoulder as cars drove by me. “Dude, I’m supposed to go into offices and get them to buy art. My car is fucking full of it!” My tone, a setup for his assurance that the job was beneath me, a plea for his blessing to walk back from the ledge.
“Try it out for a few days,” he told me nonchalantly, “You never know.” He had worked at his family’s grocery store in South Florida most of his life, and was used to people coming in to solicit. Angry, I put my car back in drive and threw my change at the automated booth. I had nowhere else to be but the ledge.
I pulled into the parking lot of an enormous office complex and started to panic again. I called my manager and explained that there were barely any cars in the lot, that everyone was probably out to lunch and the offices looked old. They probably weren’t in the market for new decor. “Paul,” he told me, and again I waited to be coddled, “just get the fuck out the car.”
My mobile gallery; a 2001 Nissan Altima.
Door after door I botched my way through the sales pitch, getting told no with varying degrees of politeness. “Fuck off,” “You got a license for that?” “Where’d you steal ‘em from?” For five hours straight I voluntarily walked from one firing squad to the next, my pride taking a bullet each time. It was death on replay.
Wounded from rapid-fire rejection, I headed to my car with all the ammo I needed to quit. Fuck this shit, I thought. In my country you never work without the guarantee of pay, that’s called being a pendejo. What the hell was I thinking? I laughed to myself in consolation.
As I was shoving the merchandise into the back seat, a lady intercepted me.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Don’t worry. I’m leaving.” I recoiled.
“Can I see that one?” she asked.
For the first time, I sensed opportunity. “Oh. Here you go,” I said, and handed her an eighteen by twenty four inch frame.
I pulled out two others that completed the set and laid them against the side of my car. “It’s a triptych,” I told her, remembering the term for a set of three, “They go together,” I added, just like I’d learned in training. She set the one she’d been holding next to them. An empty beach chair under a coconut tree stared invitingly back at her. She smiled teeth-out and I held my breath as she opened her purse.
I sold the set to her and made my first dollar in America. My lungs filled back up with purpose. Immigrants will know the feeling, the first time you put money towards sending remittance back home. Pride restored.
For the next four years I sold framed artwork out of my car. Unannounced and unexpected, I drove to office parks, strip malls, medical buildings, and residential communities across Florida and cold-knocked on their doors. Yes, I was a door to door salesman.
Developing Rhinoceros skin
The road to becoming a professional peddler is paved by naysayers. “No one outside of us will understand why you do this,” managers would tell us, “not your family, not your friends and even you will try to talk yourself out of it.” We were taught to have thick skin like the company mascot, the rhino. “Whatever gets thrown at you bounces off. Keep moving forward.”
They were right. I struggled to tell people in my life what I was doing for a living. While my friends back home started masters programs or businesses, I was getting told to “get the fuck out” by angry office managers or having the cops called on me after sneaking into gated communities. “I do home and corporate decorating,” I would tell people, and hoped they wouldn’t press for details. Most days I felt like the bottom of the totem pole, the side buried in soil.
Two months into the job I was invited to go on a week-long sales trip to Jacksonville. I’d been scraping by and still doubting the gig, but I was assured by others who preceded me that this was where people had breakthroughs. “We haven’t been there in over a year, there will be new businesses and homes that need art. It’s fresh territory!” I hesitated but agreed to go. I had put my back against a wall, and my ability to make ends meet depended on decorating it.
For five days, twelve of us camped out in a Motel 6. Each morning we loaded our cars and went our separate ways to look for buyers. Fully immersed, and with little interference from the outside world, I drank the sales kool-aid and things started to click. It was on that trip that I went from making a handful of sales a day to over ten.
On our last night in Jacksonville, after having my most successful week so far, I pulled my manager aside and told him that I had an uneasy feeling. He urged me to call my people and see if everyone was okay. I called my parents, friends and bandmates. Everyone was fine.
“You know what that feeling is?” He asked me,
I shook my head.
“You’re shedding skin.”
A truck full of art on a roadtrip
Getting told no for a living
My peak at the job came when I understood that the answer to success lay in a question: How much rejection can you take?
The goal each day was to talk to a hundred people about the art. On average eighty of them would tell me no, and twenty of them would want to look at it. Within those twenty, I would find one to ten buyers. That was the key; if I showed it to enough people, the art would sell itself.
That meant that everyday I failed at least eighty percent of the time. It was torturous, but something curious happens when you are turned down enough times and stick it out; you stop giving a fuck about rejection.
Freed from its sting, you start to realize rejection isn’t a bug in the process, it’s the most important feature.
Art prints imitating life
I consider that job a mentor. One that taught me to look at my throwaway drafts, shows that flopped, band members who quit, abandoned business ideas, and other failures, all as pieces I’ve acquired in my perennial collection of no’s.
Whenever I face resistance and feel the urge to give up, I think of the countless times I thought of quitting, but stuck it out. Days where I had no sales at five o’clock, only to find a doctor with a checkbook sitting in his new office at five o’one. Days where I got chewed out so bad that I felt worthless, but would later bring someone to tears with the perfect art for their first home.
When it’s my own mind discouraging me, imitating the voices that told me “you can't do that here,” I recall being on the side of the road, wanting to turn back, and not risk my last dollar on paying the toll. If that version of me was able to put the car in gear and go, this version can throw everything I’ve got at the fucking toll booth.
Anytime I knock and rejection greets me at the door with another loss, I remember that I’m a collector. Each addition brings me closer to my version of success. Every no is a sign of progress.
For those of us willing to collect, we may find that our best work is the one we took the time to fail at the most.
