Before the jet lag wears off I need to expand the meat that became the protein that sustains me.
Having bounced around the arid dessert of New Mexico in the summers at my uncle Diego's junkyard and auto glass business; I picked up the glass trade. It was the gig that most of my family and even neighbors from the old country where in.
Expelled from high school in the eleventh grade with no prospects or treasure map, logically I would follow.
About a year after opening up my auto glass business, which I named Gator, I wasn't going hungry anymore but ambition was eating at me.
This was my first offensive, this was my first strong-arm attack against the rancid stench that is poverty.
I took my basic education to a place where it could get polished. I went to the library, not just any library, but the main library in downtown Miami.
I wanted to peruse their collection of international yellow pages that where housed there.
A pocket full of quarters and an insatiable thirst for bettering my station in life. I diligently photocopied all the pages having to do with cars: from body shops to rental car agencies even automobile assembly plants, where targets in my dartboard.
I was a buccaneer page after page all I could see was gold.
Yet I knew the honey hole was the companies that where retrofitting regular vehicles into armored ones. Bullet proof glass was in demand and I had ships at the harbor.
I knew that there where lists and I made their blood trail my money trail.
While school and I quarreled I looked under its skirt for what mattered to me and her panties told me that the forty niners didn't make as much money on gold as did the shovel, donkey and rope dealers.
Purveyors dominate and fools loose.
I still remember debating the investment in a fax machine. I deliberated this issue with my father for days. At the time this machine cost a small fortune, three hundred dollars was a lot of money for me, yet I bought it.
Decisions would always be the same only numbers would change but the process wouldn't.
Man of action. Inaction was the abortion that never would be, not me I am timber. Build you a fire, craft you a ship, stick you in a coffin kind of pine.
Young, yearning to be I sprung like a leak onto the streets of Bogota. Courage was mine and fear was someone else's bitch.
I had my yellow page copies, I had my business cards. I had an appointment with destiny.
I wore a dead mans suit not exactly custom tailored but it was free. I was always safe in it, death would pass me by and mistake me for dead already.
Taxis delivered me from the barrio El Chicó to the Invasiones neighborhoods in the outskirts of town. That's where most of the business targets where.
Hola my name is Ariel Lopez I'm from Miami and I can sell you all the glass that Pittsburgh can produce. This was my typical pitch. The typical response was; is this your father's company?
That would infuriate me but as I learned first in Colombia and then throughout Latin America to be in your early twenties and be the master of the house keeper of the zoo was a huge anomaly.
They had no idea that my staff, the backbone of my operation, the sales force, the cleaning crew, the delivery driver, the auto glass installers and the coffee maker where all the same person.
I went to sell glass
To be continued...
