The question

by Philip Parodayco // written on 10 November 2002, saved in Pjournal

We were waiting for another person to arrive before the meeting began. A woman had arrived before me and sat, feigning an awkward patience. She struck up a conversation with Jerry (I'll call him Jerry) while we waited. I did my best to be comfortable. The office was in an old storefront building. It was a cold place with banks of overhead fluorescent lights and scattered bits of random furniture. The centerpiece was a block of gray cubicles. Everyone was quietly working in heavy coats and sweaters; I only saw their backs.

Jerry grew up in Ireland, his first eleven years spent in poverty. Christmas presents were the chalk he'd use to draw pictures on the sidewalk. He thought everyone was rich in America. When he was brought here, his uncle bought him more new clothes than he'd ever had in his life. He'd had only four sets before — one for school, one for work, one for play, and one for church. That's all. He's still amazed by the avariciousness of Americans. It's not that we're greedy, he says, it’s just that we always seem to want more. He knows we've been trained from birth to shop and he admits he loves to shop too.

The final person arrived and we were brought around to our meeting room, a long folding table. I found a seat and looked for a place to trash the twisted piece of wire lying before me. Jerry apologized and removed it; they had had a pizza party the day before, he explained.

Jerry always wanted to be an artist, he loves to draw and paint. “I'm an artist at heart, a marketer by profession.” He was offered scholarships to a few of the Art Institutes around the country — they're a chain of art schools in the U.S. — but he turned them down. He pursued a business degree to learn to market himself as an artist but the art of marketing itself won his heart.

He hadn't attended a prestigious school, somewhere in Alaska we were told, but he took part in national marketing examinations — the kind where you have to understand how people will respond to a red coffee maker as compared to a green one — and had scored in the top five percent nationally. This led to a position with a large advertising agency. He quickly worked his way through the ranks and was supervising a team of eleven people in the pursuit of new clients. He'd done extremely well, winning a major account for the company. There was celebration, a party in his honor. He asked his boss about their next steps with this new project and was told that the CEO had shelved it — he was trying to get reelected by the board and thought the project would hurt his chances. At that moment, at his own party, Jerry quit the agency.

He started his own companies. I say companies plural because Jerry would only stay with them for a short while. Until they'd developed their potential, he said, until he'd get bored. A chain of tattoo parlors served as an example. These were mall stores and stations that he'd opened across various states on the east coast. He tired of the operation and sold each one to the local manager for a fraction of its value. He didn't care about getting rich.

Jerry and his wife were separated; she took everything. His net worth went from one and a half million to about one hundred thousand. He moved to the west coast to start over, beginning in California before ending up in Portland. Here, he's marketing web sites and services to two niches: nightclubs and strip clubs. No one is going after these businesses and Jerry showed us plans that he expects to pay big dividends.

Why do I know so much about Jerry? I'd come for a job interview and he owned the company. After nearly an hour, Jerry asked only one question. “Are you still interested?”