Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

  It was hard enough to get people to sign up for Amway. My parents, in describing their experience, said that most people had heard of the company and believed it was a pyramid scheme. In fact, part of my parents’ strategy for “showing The Plan” was that they didn’t even tell people it was Amway118 until the very end of their presentation—then they signed them up on the spot. If they couldn’t sign them up right then, they invited them to a meeting. Most of the time, even though they told them not to talk to anybody about Amway before the meeting, the prospect would go to their brother-in-law, who would tell them it was crap. “And if they make it to the meeting, this guy”—the creepy guy in the upline—“stands up there and is a complete ass,” says my dad. “And the people that you encouraged and cajoled, they take a look at you and say, ‘What?’ And then they don’t return your phone call.”

  Not everybody in the world has a big vision of what life can be. Most people go to work, they get a check, they go home, and that’s their life: they don’t have a big vision.

  “To build that in somebody is a great effort,” says my dad. “And then, once you do build it, to have somebody go and tear it apart because he’s a jackass . . .”

  On top of that, my dad’s advertising business was taking off. He didn’t have time for two entrepreneurial ventures. Forced to choose between them, the best option was clear.

  I think of my family’s time in Amway as achievement tourism. We left reality for a moment and believed the impossible was possible. My dad still wonders if there’s more he could have done, if there’s a way for him to have succeeded in Amway—admitting in the next breath that there isn’t. My parents tried everything. At each turn, the people they thought were supposed to be helping them—their upline, yes, but really the overall structure of the Amway Corporation itself—actually stood in their way. They built dreams and worked to achieve them, but the only people who benefited from their work were the people already on top.

  For my part, I’m now skeptical of my materialist impulses. The dreams I built in Amway don’t appeal to me anymore. I find them claustrophobic. Ultimately they made the walls close in on my family as we reduced our visions for ourselves to what we owned rather than who we were and how we lived our lives.

  Directly across the state from my family, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, is the Windsor country club. Home architecture here is strictly regulated. Residents drive around on golf carts, on and off the eighteen-hole course. There’s an equestrian center, tennis courts, a concierge, and a gun club.119 Occasionally Prince Charles pays a visit. This is where you go when you bypass Palm Beach on your way to vacation—there’s no kitsch in Windsor, only the highly refined. Among its residents are retail billionaire W. Galen Weston, the Swarovski clan—and the DeVoses, who own three houses here and spend eight weeks a year or more on the waterfront.120

  “I never wanted to have a house in Florida,” Betsy DeVos explained to the Wall Street Journal. “But Windsor is so different from the rest of Florida.”121

  There’s no such thing as class in Windsor—everyone is as rich as everybody else. In Windsor, Rich DeVos can catch some rays in peace. No one bothers him about “ethical this” and “fraudulent that.” He plays golf all day. He never has to mow the lawn or wait at a traffic light.

  In Windsor, Rich is surrounded by civilized people. There are no termites. The pool is always eighty degrees. The beach is walking distance. There are no sharks in the water, even at night. Birds never shit on his car in Windsor. There are no loud tourists in Windsor. There’s no media. There’s plenty of shade. There are no alligators.

  The people are all Rich’s friends in Windsor. People always agree with him here. In Windsor, there is only small talk. Everyone donates to the charities of Rich’s choosing. He gets a hole in one every day.

  In 2010, Amway reached a settlement reportedly valued at $100 million in a California class action lawsuit122 filed by three former distributors who claimed the company was operating as a pyramid scheme. In addition to paying the plaintiffs and their attorneys, the company announced in a letter to its employees that, as part of the settlement, it was taking action to address many of the concerns raised in the case. Among the actions taken were tripling investments in IBO education programs and more than doubling the number of professional trainers, such as the Yagers, across the country.123 A year after the California case was settled, Amway offices in India were raided for the second time among multiple complaints about the company’s practices and its upper-level distributors. The following year, they were raided again, and the CEO of Amway India was arrested for fraud.124

  In 2014, Founders Crown Ambassadors Barry Chi and Holly Chen, who run the biggest Amway distributorship in the world125 based in Taiwan, were sued by nine Chinese immigrants in the Southern California region who claimed that, although Chi and Chen promised they could potentially make millions in commissions, Amway business owners make closer to $200 a month.126

  Some things never change.

  Records

  All names have been changed.

  I meet Jerod my senior year of high school. It’s the year I get my braces off, the year I switch from glasses to contacts. He’s a senior, too, though we go to different schools: I’m in the arts magnet studying music; he’s in the technical school across the street, where he’s earning his GED. The day we meet, he’s working at the Chick-fil-A in the Tyrone Square food court and charms me into giving him my phone number, then a cigarette. We smoke in the parking lot behind a row of Dumpsters, putrefying under the midday Florida sun. He has dark red hair, amber eyes, and full lips. His fingers make delicate little movements with his cigarette. He asks me what kind of music I like.

  “Bright Eyes.”

  “Never heard of it,” he says.

  “Elliott Smith?”

  He shakes his head. He tells me he’s DJ Qwork and he spins electro. He has a set of Technics turntables in his room and milk crates full of vinyl. Once a month, he hauls his crates to Ybor City and waits outside the Amphitheatre for the chance to spin, but mostly, he just spins for friends in his room, or at house parties, or at raves under the Sunshine Skyway. He always knows when raves are happening. His favorite thing to do, after spinning records, is to hold forth about the history of electronic music and the nuances of the subgenres: jungle, drum ’n’ bass, house, ambient—there are hundreds. He has a tan hat with the word “electro” embroidered on the brim. He wears it every day, always perfectly clean.

  We’re seventeen, but he’s older streetwise, has lived a whole life before me—so he thinks I’m sweet and I like proving that I’m not. The year before, his mother sent him to live with his father in St. Petersburg, to escape what she considered negative influences. The way he talks about his recent past in Tampa is thrilling to me. He’s freebased cocaine, shot heroin, fucked a lot of girls—by this time, I’ve seen five penises and slept with three people, maybe a total of ten times. Shortly after we start dating, he graduates to the smoothie counter next door to the Chick-fil-A. It’s also when he meets Sean, who becomes our main drug connect. This is where my year of living dangerously begins.

  My high school is an arts magnet program designed to bring white kids into a black neighborhood. It’s a school within a school: maybe four hundred kids in the magnet, out of two thousand total. Theoretically, anyone can enter the arts program, but you have to audition to get in. So, it helps if you also went to the arts elementary school and the arts middle school, which I did. Since fifth grade, I’ve studied ballet, character dance, jazz dance, vocal music, musical theater, and visual art. I also served a brief stint in the handbell ensemble.

  In my sophomore year of high school, I changed my major from musical theater to vocal performance—fleeing musical theater’s narcissism—and joined the choir. The choir is austere. We study opera. Once a week, I leave choir class to take private singing lessons with Mrs. Bancroft in a tiny studio with an upright piano. At the end of my senior year, I’ll give a finale recital wi
th my best friends, Gisele and Lily.

  My other best friend, Ashley, is a dance major. We met at theater camp the summer after first grade. Ace of Base’s “I Saw the Sign” was the hottest thing on the radio after Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover.” We played Ace of Base on the camp stereo every morning, and I sang Mariah Carey’s “Hero” at the end-of-the-summer show. I’ve always been a singer. But Ashley’s always been a dancer. She started when she was six and has stuck with it all the way until now, our senior year, eleven years later. The dancers are known for being kind of slutty, and there’s a rumor that some of them can smoke cigarettes with their vaginas. Ashley isn’t a slut, but she embraces the bad-girl persona. She’s lanky, and her weight fluctuates constantly depending on whether she’s eating or not. She smokes a pack of cigarettes a day. She pulls off tiny shorts better than anyone else I know.

  Our senior year, Ashley meets Miles. Miles works at the Petland next to the movie theater in Largo Mall. We hang out at the movie theater whether or not we’re seeing a movie. Ashley recently started a job there, so now we’re friends with all of the employees. At the theater—in general—we collect friends. Not friends with common interests, but friends whose common ground is an overall lack of interests. They’re simply around, gathering in empty spaces like dirt swept into sidewalk cracks. Miles is one of these people. He appears to know a lot about animals. He keeps a menagerie of reptiles in tanks next to his bongs. He’s seven years our senior, and he really likes pills.

  Miles seems harmless at first. He makes eye contact. He’s okay-looking: sandy hair, green eyes that are a little too close together. And he knows that we crave male attention, so he flirts with us, which we think is fun. He gets jealous, which Ashley finds flattering, at least in the beginning. He always has weed, and sometimes something extra—Xanax, Vicodin, ecstasy. Ecstasy is the new designer drug, and everyone who does it thinks he’s an expert on it. Miles rattles off the formulas of pills he buys as though he pressed them himself.

  Ashley’s mom has cancer, and she’s missing a good chunk of our senior year staying home to take care of her—or saying she’s home. It’s also hard for Ashley to be in the house where her mother is dying, so she finds ways not to be there. Miles becomes a good reason not to be there. Soon after Ashley starts dating him, she tries ecstasy and discovers its particular breed of euphoric joy. She starts doing it all the time.

  Miles moves around a lot. When we meet him, he’s living in a powder blue duplex off of Ulmerton Road, in an unincorporated area between Largo and Pinellas Park considered trashy. Some of our friends from the movie theater live there, and within a few months of meeting Miles, Ashley is basically living there, too. She sleeps at Miles’s and shows up to school at seven thirty the next morning hung over, still in dance clothes. After school, she drives home to check on her mom and then goes to the movie theater, where she works for a few hours, and then to Miles’s, where she spends the night. Her own house becomes a place to change her clothes. She comes to school less and less. Then she stops coming altogether.

  I don’t really know what goes on at the duplex. Concerned, I show up there one Saturday afternoon. Miles is sleeping. Ashley and I sit on an overstuffed sofa with Miles’s friend, a metalhead, thirtysomething guy named Clark, who works at an electronics store. We smoke cigarettes with the windows closed and the blinds drawn. At some point, Ashley tells us Miles is sleeping off a Xanax high. She says, “I’m going to go wake him up with a blow job.”

  I sit alone with Clark on the sofa. I don’t know him well, but I’ve heard his girlfriend is scary. I saw her once; I remember little more than the heart-shaped padlock tattoo that covered her whole chest. Clark and I make small talk. Within ten minutes, Ashley is back. She’s crying. She marches into the kitchen, turns on the stove, and starts to silently make an egg sandwich. Clark and I follow her with our eyes. Midway through, she returns to the bedroom, and we hear shouting. She’s back out a minute later, slamming the door. We ask her what’s wrong.

  “He’s a fucking asshole when he wakes up from Xanax,” she says.

  She finishes the sandwich and takes it in to him. There’s more yelling. I leave.

  With Jerod, smoking weed is a way of keeping time. It’s a ritual that marks the end of one state of being and the start of another: separateness, togetherness; stillness, goingness. When I arrive at his house after school, we smoke a bowl. When Sean comes to pick us up to go to a party, we smoke a bowl. It welcomes new people into the fold. Seeking out more of it gives us a mission. It mobilizes us so that we can make ourselves once again immobile, and celebrate our weed-seeking victories by smoking more weed while watching cartoons.

  Stoned in his room, we talk about music. We agree on Kraftwerk and certain Pink Floyd albums. We disagree on almost everything else, but we tolerate each other’s tastes. I come to like Anthony Rother, and Jerod comes to like Radiohead. I’m in my third year of music theory classes, and I like to count out the time signatures for him, lying on his bunk bed while he spins. He likes the grinding bass and driving drumbeat of electro. It’s dark and beautiful. It makes him feel fierce. When he spins, he presses his headphones to one ear and bobs over the mixing board, wiggling his fingers. When he gets to his favorite parts, he lifts his hands into the air like he’s praying.

  He knows what he wants and who he is. He has a bright future. It’s glow-lit, a laser light show. His favorite movie is Groove; his favorite book is Last Night a DJ Saved My Life; his money goes toward drugs and records. He isn’t complicated. He’s determined.

  He explains his DJ name to me. “A Qwork is an inherent quandary,” he says. We’re sitting on his bedroom carpet after a makeout session. Rave posters hang on his walls among glow-in-the-dark stars and comets. He reaches over to his backpack and retrieves a spiral notebook and a pencil. On the first empty page he draws a wiggly half circle. With the two loose ends, he completes a square, then draws another square a little ways off and connects the corners to make the image look three-dimensional.

  “It’s a cube and a sphere smashed together into one entity,” he says earnestly, looking me in the eye. “It’s self-made.”

  We roll every few weeks. Sometimes Sean scores the ecstasy, sometimes another friend. It’s a warm October when Sean picks up Jerod and me and drives us to a party in one of the beach neighborhoods. I don’t know the person throwing it; we meet at a different house each time. Jerod is supposed to spin at this one, so he’s brought his records, which ride in the trunk. On the way, we pick up Gisele. She and I have been best friends since freshmen orientation. It’s her first time rolling—she’s nervous about it and wants to be around people she trusts.

  Gisele is petite and half Yemeni: curly black hair down her back, cardamom skin, sharp brown eyes, and an asymmetrical smile. She’s gaga for Cirque du Soleil and has aspirations of being a performer—she’s trained herself in hand balancing and is a virtuoso with glow sticks: a favorite at every party. If hand balancing fails, she plans to fall back on acrobatics. If that fails, she’ll be a singer. She’s one of the best singers in our class, one of the best I’ve ever heard, and already has inside connections at Cirque. She’s made friends with a hand balancer from the show Quidam, and with a costume artist from Dralion. She’s spent a week in France with the costume artist and her ex-boyfriend, a vocalist from Quidam. She knows all of the Cirque songs by heart. When we graduate, she plans to go traveling as an usher with the show Alegria, with hopes of apprenticing under the vocalists.

  It’s magic hour when we arrive at the party. The house sits on stilts with a screened-in balcony facing the street. A shirtless man lies on the floor of the living room as we enter. Others huddle in various corners. A set of turntables waits against the wall by the sliding glass doors that lead out to the balcony. Within an hour, we’re grinding our teeth and chain-smoking Newports, and blowing Vicks inhalers into each other’s eyes. The balcony is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, and everyone on it is part soul mate, part genius. Gis
ele and I kiss to solidify our connection.

  TJ appears next to us. TJ dated our friend Lily in middle school and took her virginity. It’s generally understood that he did her wrong somehow, but none of us knows exactly what happened. His head is shaved from the bottom of his hairline up to the tops of his ears. The rest is dreadlocked and pulled into a bundle. He wears a white T-shirt, parachute pants, and skateboarding shoes. We’ve seen his picture before but never met him. Before we know it, we’re deep in conversation.

  “Spinning is an out-of-body experience,” he tells us. He’s introduced himself as DJ Mission, one of the DJs spinning tonight. His specialties are trance and techno. He’s just finished and DJ Qwork is on.

  “We’re singers,” Gisele says. “For us, it’s not out-of-body, it’s from-the-body.”

  “An in-body experience,” he says.

  “Coming-out-of,” I correct him.

  “Your spirit touches the audience,” Gisele says.

  Sometime later, they’re gone and I’m melting ice on a stranger’s chest. I recognize him as the man who was lying on the floor when I first arrived. He’s still on the floor. His eyes are closed and his hands are up above his head. His chest is tan and muscular. Glow sticks reflect in the rivulets of water trickling over it. He’s telling me about his job as a public speaker.