by Nik Richie
It works. Ginger goes nuts.
Ginger blows up my phone:
“How the fuck could you cheat on me like this???”
“I can’t believe you betrayed me! Why would you do that?”
“That bitch is a nobody…she’s only with you because she wants to be famous.”
“I hope you like fucking a fatass!”
I don’t respond. I’m laughing my ass off over this, not because of anything Ginger says. It’s because I figured her out. I played her game better than she did. She’s not the one. She’s a fucking psycho, so every plane she didn’t get on and all the lies about Lester Diamond make sense now. It’s not my fault. It’s hers.
Ginger keeps texting me, talking shit on Ashley:
“I can’t believe you’re fucking Z-List, Nik. She’s a fucking cow.”
After enough non-responses, she calls Scooby up in an attempt to get to me, see what I’m thinking, to find out if the whole Ashley thing is a joke or something. The reality is that Scooby is the last person she should be calling. He hates her. When Nik Richie goes into shutdown mode, the fun stops: no parties, no girls, no Twitpics of being out or acting like you’re the king of the world at some club. No one gets laid. So when Ginger fucked me over, she inadvertently fucked Scooby over too.
Instead of being out and having bottle service, he had to come home to me being all bummed out on his couch. Scooby is a friend, but he doesn’t like playing therapist.
Now Ginger is calling him, trying to dig up info and saying shit like, “What the fuck is his deal? Is he just doing this to make my pregnancy difficult?”
He says, “Sarah, it’s over. Nik’s moved on.”
“To fucking Z-List? Really, Scooby?”
“He likes this girl. Get over it.”
Ginger texts me: You really hurt me.
She’s broken. I broke her. I finally text her back and say: Now you know how it feels.
She says: Nik just call me. Please call me.
She says: I need to hear you. I need to hear your voice.
I shouldn’t call her. I shouldn’t. It should be over. Ginger fucked me over. I fucked her back. I won. I should walk away while I’m still ahead. I don’t though. I don’t because I still feel for her, and Ginger makes me do things that are stupid and impulsive. So I call her, and Ginger starts going on about how I’m the one and that she loves me and she’s sorry, so fucking sorry for all the bullshit and the Lester Diamond stuff. She says that she’s fixed all that.
“I got an abortion,” Ginger tells me. “So now we can be together.”
I don’t say anything.
“Eduardo’s gone…I told him I miscarried.”
I don’t say anything.
“I did it for you…so dump Ashley and let’s be together. It can be like it was before.”
I’m silent.
“Hello?”
I hang up.
I delete Ginger’s number from my phone. I stop following her on Twitter and defriend her on Facebook. She’s psychotic. I know that now. She crossed a line that I didn’t believe she was capable of crossing, and I can’t have that kind of blood on my hands. I can’t be with someone who killed a baby for me. It’s too fucked-up. Too fucked-up for even me, so I erase her. The thing with Zarlin, our public relationship cools off. She’s psycho in her own way. I find myself surrounded by psychotic women, fame-chasers, instability, and I’m getting scarred in the process. There’s no hope for normality, and it’s getting to the point where I’m starting to think I’m the one doing something wrong. Maybe Nik Richie is the problem.
Maybe he was a bad idea.
39Refers to: “Would you hook up with this girl?” By selecting this option (category) during the submissions process you are asking Nik Richie’s opinion of a particular girl. Over 99% of the time he will say no and/or suggest changes in order to improve whomever you’ve sent.
40So called because she thought she was a celebrity, but the truth of the matter is that she played a very minor role in a reality show which put her way below D-List.
Origins (Part 2)
In my mid-twenties, Scottsdale was like the Dubai of America. Everybody was good-looking. Plastic surgery was on the rise. It was one of those places where people went out all the time because it was so cheap to live there, so the social scene was at a pinnacle of sorts. Everybody either had money or they were pretending to have it and living off overdraft protection. The reality is that most people, myself included, made about thirty grand a year but were acting like millionaires: they’d get their bi-weekly check of $950 and spend about half of it on bottle service and drugs and whatever else they thought would help them hook up with chicks. And girls were blowing their money on Louboutin pumps and MAC makeup and eightballs of coke to keep them from eating. Or they were saving up for a boob job. Everybody was getting photographed being out, having fun, living the life. It was the point in which the city was at the height of its decadence, and the people in the scene were consumed with vanity. It was all about appearances.
Appearing rich.
Appearing successful.
Didn’t matter if it was true. At that point in time, presenting a wealthy persona was almost the same thing as having one, and nobody was there to say otherwise.
Not yet anyway.
I was playing the game too. Chasing money. Trying to live that life. I was out at the clubs on the weekends just like everyone else: scoping out chicks, drinking, watching guidos pop bottles from across the way. The big difference was that all of my friends, my acquaintances, weren’t pretending to be wealthy. They had the Ferraris and Benzes and the eight-figure bank accounts. Unlike the office slaves and weekend warriors, they didn’t celebrate every bottle of Grey Goose they bought at the club because it wasn’t a big deal to them. It was normal. These guys actually had the life most people in Scottsdale pretended to have. I tried to keep up, but these guys knew I wasn’t rich or even remotely in their league. Far from it.
I worked for NPMG 41, which was backed by JPMorgan/Chase at the time. People knew the name JPMorgan, so to be able to say that I worked there added to my clout by extension. I wore a suit. A tie. I shaved, did my hair, and wore the most expensive cologne. On the surface, this appeared to be a respectable existence. Again, this goes back to appearing to be more than what you are. It was a shit job. I worked in a cubicle farm as a glorified telemarketer.
Even though you’d see me at all the best clubs on the weekends, Monday through Friday I was calling up small businesses and trying to set appointments. From 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. I was hitting up the East Coast, attempting to convince these business owners to sit down with one of our SAEs 42 so they could get scammed. This place was exactly like Boiler Room, right down to the management saying things like, “Don’t set wood 43,” and “Don’t act like a fucking Canadian 44.” It was like being with Carlo Oddo the child-fucker all over again.
The first part of the process broke down like this: I would make anywhere between 200 and 300 calls a day to notify the person on the sheet that they were processing at a high enough level to cut out the middleman. Basically, every time they took a payment with a credit card or a debit card, they were hit with a fee. Over time, those fees would become substantial. “Substantial” as in thousands and thousands of dollars.
“So what we’d like to do is set you up with an appointment with one of our SAEs to cut out those fees,” I’d say. “This could potentially save you around ten grand a year because we work directly with the banks.”
Step two is that our SAE would go out to meet with this person, comparing what they currently paid to how much they’d save with our system. The trick, the scam, is that our SAEs were bullshit brokers. They’d convince these business owners that they needed credit card processing ‘machines’ they actually didn’t, and they’d never calculate our company’s fees.
So when Mr. and Mrs. Small Business Owner checked their statement the next month and realized they were getting fucked, it didn’t matt
er. They were under contract already by that point. If they wanted out, it was going to cost them $750 for the cancellation. Either way, we got them.
I was quite good at fucking people over.
Some things never change.
NPMG was a chop shop, a place where college dropouts like myself could go and pretend to be businessmen, and my manager was a racist prick. This guy, Sean Mecham, would run the floor all day spouting sales bullshit like “A-B-C 45,” and “Motion is emotion,” and there was never a good day with this guy. If you set thirty appointments, you could do better. If you set forty, he’d ask why you didn’t set forty-one. He had it in for me because I got hooked up with the job through Lance Moore46, the guy who owned the place.
In front of the entire staff, he’d yell at me, “Hooman, you fucking sand Canadian, I know how you got this job! There aren’t any fucking favors here!”
Then he’d take my chair away until I booked an appointment.
Sean hated me because he thought that I was coming into the place expecting special treatment. The floor hated me because they were keying off Sean. In this business, you listened to the guy that made the most money, and Sean made about 300K a year. He had the Breitling watch and the car and the hot wife that he cheated on with girls in the office. Sean had what I wanted. The only reason I put up with the bullshit is because Lance told me that I had to pay my dues on the phones before I could become an SAE, and SAEs at the time were making six figures easily.
The NPMG business model was a scam: we were charging hidden fees and locking these merchants into extended contracts so we could bleed them dry. I quickly became aware of that, but I was so money-hungry it didn’t really affect me. There was no guilt. No liability. And I was so determined to show Sean up that anytime he called me a sand Canadian it made me try harder. I was going to break him before he broke me, so I started coming into work early. I’d stay late. I’d skip lunch and not take breaks. Some saw it as a work ethic, but in reality I was just trying to prove Sean was wrong about me.
It was not a good time in my life. The job sucked. The pay was shit. My manager was a cocksucker and my marriage was on the rocks. The only real bright spot was hanging out with T.J. Feuerbach, who was sort of my partner-in-crime at NPMG. We bullshitted about sports and talked about the club scene. It was a way to kill time in between calls, and killing time was essential in a job like that. He’d point out a chick in the office that happened to come into our field of vision. She’d be going to the bathroom or walking to the appointment board, and T.J. would ask me, “Hey Hooman, would you?”
When you’re good at something, you can be an asshole and get away with it. Just think about all those professional athletes and Hollywood actors who treat normal people like shit. Win a Super Bowl or an Academy Award and suddenly you’re above the common man. You can spit in the face of a child and the parents will thank you for it. It’s a standard practice: the better you are in your particular field, the more leverage you have over people.
I was good at my job.
Really fucking good.
Between my hard-on for money and the drive to prove my racist boss wrong about me, a perfect storm happened, and from the wreckage rose a salesman. After months of Sean calling me sand Canadian and thousands of calls later, something clicked and my natural charm was being channeled into the job. The scam. I was scamming so many people. It started at around twenty per day. Then about thirty. Eventually, it got to the point where 45% of the total appointments were being set by me. One guy doing roughly half the company’s work. There were some days where Sean would literally pull the chair of every employee but me. It’s not that he didn’t want to. He couldn’t. I was too good.
The problem was that I became self-aware of the fact.
I had paid my dues on the phones and wanted the SAE job, had been asking Sean about it for quite some time. About every twenty minutes I was walking up to the appointment board and ringing the sales bell—not celebrating, but sending a message to Sean. I was telling him that I’ve risen to the top and I wanted out. I wanted the opportunity I had rightfully earned, yet, every time I approached him on the subject and got the same bullshit about not acting like a sand Canadian.
He told me, “You’ll go out when we say you do, carpet bomber.”
And then he went and took someone else’s chair away from them. I had been doing the phone scam for more than a half a year by this point and Sean was going to keep me there, in my seat, calling and calling and calling for as long as he could. The calls wouldn’t end. The scam had no end. I was going to be there forever if I didn’t do something drastic.
I decided to take away the only thing from Sean that I could.
I started tanking it.
I went from thirty or forty appointments a day to one or two. I stopped coming in early and staying late, stopped skipping my breaks. It was like being a new hire again. Me, sitting there on the phone and pretending it was my first day: flubbing my lines, screwing up my pitch. Playing with my cell phone. This was my internal strike.
I wanted something. Sean refused to give it to me.
All things considered, he should have seen it coming.
The first couple of days, he thought it was a fluke. He asked me questions about my health or if something was wrong. Sean was trying to figure out why his top producer was suddenly performing like a rookie. He was panicking because he forgot how much he had grown to rely upon me. Hooman Karamian was Mr. Dependable in his eyes, and then he became Mr. Rebel.
The flow chart of blame worked like this: the bosses saw the numbers, and the numbers were about 45% less than what they normally were. The bosses then yelled at Sean about the shitty numbers, which in turn led to Sean yelling at me in a way that only Sean could:
“You fucking sand nigger motherfucker! Do you know how much you’re fucking me?! Get your terrorist ass out of that fucking chair!”
Sean’s mouth in my ear, breath like stale coffee and vending machine food, he yelled, “Get your fucking ass in gear, you fuck! You hear me, you little sand-cunt? A-B-C! A-B-C! Close the fucking deal, shitbag!”
He took the chair.
I smiled. I was smiling because breaking people is fun, and the guy was cracking after only a few days. Just a few days of striking and I was going to get what I wanted, and by all means, he could have fired me. Sean could have, but he knew it would be much easier to bargain with me rather than attempting to find another golden goose.
NPMG was a shit job. It paid dick. Sean was a fucking terrible boss. The hours sucked. It wasn’t meaningful work. You weren’t helping people—you were actually fucking them over. It was a scam, so people either quit because of that or the pay or wanting to get away from Sean. There were plenty of places you could make 30K annually without all the stress. We all knew that. Some of us, people like me, we wanted that carrot being dangled in front of our noses: the SAE job.
He pulled me into his office and told me he knew what was going on. Sean said, “I know what you want, man.”
I sat there, leaning comfortably in the chair and listened. I wanted him to pitch me. Sean was going to have to sell me.
“I know you want that SAE job, and I’ll get you there,” he said. “But you got to keep us going. You got to. You are the next to go out. I promise. Just keep us going and it’s yours.”
It’s known as “turning someone out.”
Typically, this is when you find a girl and get her hooked on heroin. You chain her to a bed, and then you give her a little shot every eight to twelve hours. She’ll say “no” at first. Squirm. Scream. She’ll resist, but a few days into it, she’ll wait for that shot. And a few days after that, she’ll ask for it. She’ll be hooked, and then she’ll do whatever you want from that point on.
That’s what I did to Sean: I took his shot away.
I turned him out. Broke him.
Just like I knew I could.
Three months later, one of our SAEs got popped for a DUI in Orange County. That was
the sound of opportunity knocking: one of our guys getting his license suspended.
I was in my cubicle as per usual, doing my sales scam thing when Sean slapped a binder on my desk. We had become friends by that point, or something close to it, so Sean was smiling at me. This thing, a training manual, was the size of a telephone book. It contained all the information one had to learn in order to be an SAE: script, flow charts, statistics. It was the how-to guide to making six figures out on the road as a Senior Account Executive. I had been waiting close to a year for this binder.
Sean stood over me smiling, saying, “There you go, kid,” and the floor, all the people that knew how long I wanted it, how long I had lobbied for it, they stood up and clapped. Applauded. They saw hard work pay off in a place where it normally doesn’t.
Training began.
I was put in a room with two good-looking college grads, people that had actually gone to school for this position. They looked at me like I was some sort of used car salesman: equal title, but a scumbag. A slick street kid. To them, my suit wasn’t a suit, it was a costume. I wasn’t an SAE; I just happened to be dressing like one. Yet again, I felt like I was being tested, like I had to prove myself to these two fucks and the company and whoever else. Being called a sand Canadian never really bothered me, but having my credentials questioned was another matter entirely.