Timeshare Titans: A Satire

By Henderson Cloud

Timeshare Titans: A Satire is a fictional account of a man named Henderson Cloud who dies in 2019 after spending many decades in the timeshare business. He leaves all of his writings and tape recordings about his life in the industry to his daughter Maria, who endeavors to make some sense of them in exchange for receiving an inheritance of $10,000. An odd narrative ensues that describes the funny and not-so-funny experiences of Cloud and many other people who worked in the business from the late 1970s to the mid 2000s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350906912

Book preview

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Copyright © 2024 by Henderson Cloud

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 979-8-35090-690-5 (print)

ISBN: 979-8-35090-691-2 (ebook)

Contents

EDITOR’S NOTE: PLEASE READ

PROLOGUE

Editor’s Note:

Please Read

I am Maria, the daughter of Henderson Cloud. My mother’s name is Veronica, and my brother’s name is Jack. None of these names are our real names. We want to remain anonymous because we want to be left alone.

When my father died in 2019, he left me a red-and-white gym bag full of his archives. He also left me $10,000 on the condition that, within one year of his death, I published the best of this material which he had worked on and off for 40 years. This is that book.

What a mess was in that bag: dozens and dozens of golf scorecards, a golf log listing every round he played between 1980 and 2000, tickets from University of Nevada-Las Vegas basketball games, stuff like that. Also in the bag were four spiral-bound notebooks: a blue Mead 70-sheet notebook dated 1982; a white Union Camp 50-sheet notebook with no date; a yellow Write-Right 100-sheet notebook dated 1990; and a green Mead 200-sheet notebook dated 1996. The first two were completely full of stories, diary entries, and funny sayings; the second two were full of half-finished scenes and ideas for new stories like how to beat inflation permanently. Along with the notebooks was an ordinary manila folder with even more writings: dialogue typed or handwritten on white typing paper; dozens of pages of yellow legal paper filled with drafts for stories and even the start of a novel; and pages torn from in-flight magazines with little sayings like this one: Jet planes are works of art. They were hard to read too. Dad crossed out half of everything he ever wrote.

And there were cassette tapes in the bag, a total of 12 of them. Some worked when I tried to play them, some broke when I put them in Dad’s old machine. It was spooky to hear my father’s voice after he was dead. The oddest thing in the bag was a set of car keys from a Cadillac. They looked brand new, never used. I don’t remember Dad ever talking about a Cadillac. Maybe it was a company car, I don’t know.

I was born after he was out of the timeshare business and living in Orange City, Florida. Dad was working as a high school teacher there. My mother Veronica had been a nurse in Havana and was working temporarily as a custodial worker at the same high school. They met there and quickly married. I came along in 2001. My brother Jack and I had a full, happy childhood. Dad loved car trips. He said to us, I always want to be either planning a trip, on a trip, or just back from a trip. I remember him saying that in his big, booming voice that never scared me.

Dad never talked about the business. They say war vets never talk about war. Maybe it was like that. I do remember his friend Rook coming to the house one time in Orange City. He and Dad sat on the back porch drinking beer and laughing about the old days and talking about some guy named Cannon. That was the only time.

Anyway, I have split the material into three parts the best I could. Remember that some of the material was dated, some was not. I put in some editorial notes along the way to maybe help the reader understand the story better. The notes are in italics. One thing I can say is certain. On the inside of every notebook cover and at the beginning of every cassette tape, Dad wrote or said these words: Timeshare Titans: A Satire. I had to look up the definition of the word titan, and the dictionary says that it is a person of very great strength, intellect or importance, one that stands out for greatness or importance, one that is gigantic in size or power, and any of a family of giants in Greek mythology born of Uranus and Gaea and ruling the earth until overthrown by the Olympian gods. I like to think of my father as the titan in this book. He was a kind, sweet man, and I loved him.

Prologue

Editor’s Note: This was one of the last things my father wrote, probably just before his death in the fall of 2019. It was written in longhand on pages of yellow legal paper. The handwriting is shaky.

For the purposes of this narrative, call me Henderson. Henderson Cloud. It’s a pseudonym, of course. I was outside of our sales office in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 4, 1988 when the chemical plant in Henderson, Nevada blew up. I was 15 miles away, and I still got knocked down by the blast. At the time, Henderson was an industrial suburb completely separate from Las Vegas, but now in 2019 it’s pretty much part of the metro area. There were actually Henderson jokes in the old days: The all-night convenience store in Henderson closes at midnight. That sort of thing. Old-timers still say there’s still a toxic cloud over Henderson.

I bring this up because there’s still a cloud over the timeshare business. You’ve seen all the clichés: the salesman in the white shoes, the high pressure, the broken promises. Still you have to understand that millions of people are enjoying their timeshares every year. It’s the people who don’t use them and can’t sell them who are the unhappy ones.

So you can visualize me, I am six two with gray hair, a gray beard, and gray eyes. I am 75 now, wife gone, children scattered. They are all prepared for my death, in fact, they are wondering what is taking so long. I will leave them a lot of money, even after the costs of burial. They don’t know about the cancer. Stage 4. I didn’t know it until last week. That’s how they say it when you are 75. Not You’re dying but Stage 4. It doesn’t matter. I have already chartered the jet to Oregon. They have package deals now: assisted suicide, cremation, ashes flung into the deep Pacific forest. I’ve already paid the $20,000; I just have to board the plane; it seems like a good deal now. So my life is all settled—what I did, who I married, how many children I had—and I am now prepared to remember. Memories, they are funny things. They are not really the truth, but they are true to me. Some things I just made up, but those fictions are true to me. And maybe I just wanted to entertain myself on a cold Tuesday night. Who knows? OK, here I go.

Why did I move to Las Vegas in 1979? The answer: a drug deal gone bad. I tended bar in Fort Lauderdale back then, and the cocaine culture had taken hold of everything. Call it a tidal wave, call it what you want. South Florida was awash with coke, and everybody had to make a decision about it, try it, stop, keep going, sell your soul and/or body to buy it or sell it. I was somewhere in the middle, doing some to stay awake on the late shift and actually selling little match boxes of it to my regular customers at the bar while I was working. It worked like this. Before I went in about five in the afternoon, I would fill a bunch of match boxes with cocaine and bring them with me to the bar. Over the course of the night, regulars would ask, Can I get a box of matches? In reply, I would slip each one a match box full of coke. They would either tip me the price of the cocaine or add the cost of the cocaine to the tab. It was unbelievable. To supply my regulars, I bought eight balls from a dealer in my neighborhood. We became friends, and we arranged a buy for two keys worth about $30,000 in those days. But that day I had a funny feeling that the whole thing was a setup. I packed my 1978 Mercury Cordoba and started driving. I left just like that.

I had a friend named Jay whose family owned a jewelry store in Fort Lauderdale; they moved to Las Vegas to open a shop in a Strip hotel. I stopped in Mobile, Alabama and called him. He told me it was okay to come out to Las Vegas and stay with him. So I did. Myself, my clothes, my car, and about $5,000 in small bills. That’s how a lot of people arrive in Las Vegas.

Back then, people came to this town from all over the country to start over. They were always fleeing something: imminent danger (my situation), unwanted children, difficult spouses, bankruptcy, bench warrants, lots of things. When a newcomer was asked where he or she was from, the standard reply was: back East. That ended the conversation pretty quickly. It was shorthand for none of your business.

Once you became a local, there was no longer any past or future, no clocks in life just like no clocks in the casinos. It didn’t matter whether you were poor, rich, educated or not, the only thing that mattered was how you performed today, the little 24-hour block of present time.

In 1979, Las Vegas was heaven for a single man. Things that were illegal elsewhere were legal here: live gambling, sports betting, prostitution. I remember walking into the Stardust Hotel sportsbook and looking up in amazement at the gigantic boards with the names of the teams and the point spreads. You could bet as often and as much as you wanted, horses too. There were the poker rooms adjacent to the casinos, small, smoky dens where they dealt stud. Nobody played hold ’em at that time except at the kitchen table.

Any job outside of a casino was considered to be golden. People new to town feared what they saw in casino workers: the broken lives and bodies, the dealers sullen and downcast in break rooms puffing cigarettes, the cocktail girls in skimpy costumes doling out free drinks in exchange for maybe a dollar and a pinch. People happily took jobs paying five bucks an hour not to work in casinos but to be able to go to casinos.

My career in the timeshare business started innocently enough. Jay and I were drinking at Sixes and Eights, a dark little local bar on Flamingo Road about two blocks from Las Vegas Boulevard. Those were the days before video poker when locals went to bars to get away from the lights and the bells. We started talking with a guy at the bar in a white suit who was three Seven and Sevens in and calling for more. His name was Don Lime, the first timeshare guy I ever met.

After introductions, I told Don that I was looking for work. That’s all it took. Don, Jay and I had the following conversation: What, you need a job? Let me tell you, you can be working tomorrow. We’re selling something called timeshares, my friends, ever hear of it? (Jay and I shook our heads.) Oh, it’s great. They give out cash every day for first sales, double sales, stuff like that. I’m drinking on the hundred I got this morning for first sale. I looked down at the three twenties and six singles that Don had strewn on the bar. It’s easy money, easy money. All you have to do is give The Pitch, man, The Pitch, it’s everything. It starts like this: ‘Folks, when you want to go somewhere, you don’t buy the whole plane, you just buy a seat.’ That one works well. Sometimes I say, ‘You know, when you don’t want a whole pizza, you just buy a slice or two, right?’ Hey, Brenda, give these guys another drink, I’m buying. They tell you not to say the word ‘investment,’ but I do anyway. It’s Christmas every day over there, I am not sh------ you.

How does it work? I asked.