[produced in fall, 2011]
Wyndham Vacation Resorts, a division of Wyndham the mega-corporation, owns properties across the continental States, and around the globe through its sister corporation. Having evolved since its inception in 1966 into one of the world’s most ethical companies (according to Ethisphere, an independent ranking organization), Wyndham’s 21st century manifestation of the timeshare may or may not be their bread and butter. So who can afford their stately pleasure domes? To them, the question is actually: who can afford to pass on the opportunity to secure and insure one’s meaningful interactions with one’s own family, for generations to come—or at least across the three nights and four days offered, in exchange for “keeping an open heart and an open mind” over three hours’ presentation on the benefits of timeshare ownership? What are the new stakes of these, our Leisure Dollars?
The world had changed, between my nights in the Poconos in 2010 and my sleepy afternoons basking in the sun. I was curled up on a leather couch, felt the radiant heat through tinted windows and thirtieth-floor curtains: in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, the continued climate of economic collapse in the United States summed up to make timeshares look even sillier. On the second presentation, I dragged along my mother, and Wyndham offered my mother the deed to an Atlantic City condo, with enough subsequent points in a network of properties to book about forty nights’ worth of relaxation. What leaves me reeling is how one of our civilization’s most evolved corporations can gain such ethical corporate clout while offering my mother—a nurse for forty years, with excellent income and credit—the purchase of a New Jersey condo for over $67,000 (“today’s special price”), at an interest rate of 17.99%.
I had always heard maintenance fees were timeshares’ downfall, and Wyndham Vacation Resorts seems guilty of this as well. While none of the figures thrust before me were over a hundred bucks, no assurance could be made that a seventy-five dollar monthly payment, in perpetuity, wouldn’t, or couldn’t skyrocket. If Wyndham wanted to espouse a true and salable policy of sustainability, they’d make clear how they’re working to keep maintenance fees separate and uninfluenced by the rising price of gasoline. As it is, purchasing a chunk of Wyndham’s network of vacation destinations was described as a decision of eternity: a deed and title, to be passed to children and children’s children, that our descendents may experience a legacy of 2br/2ba accommodations, of corporate game rooms, free laundry and parking, and, in every kitchen cabinet of every unit in every property in the Wyndham family, the same Tupperware™, Pyrex™, and wide-screen television.
Once you’re in, you’re in: who Wyndham invites to enjoin these presentations may reflect their research on individuals’ trends in leisure, income levels, and existing relationship to Wyndham. I had stayed at a franchise for eight nights while participating in an academic program in Ohio in July, 2010; this was likely what flagged my name in their system, and identified me as someone who might bite. “It’s my job,” my sales associate in the Poconos explained frankly as we both leaned our elbows on a small, round, black table. My sales associate—I’ll call him Gil, after the recurring hard-luck character on The Simpsons™--ran his fingers through his thinning hair as he followed corporate training on how to develop rapport. Gil’s stress—of this work, and likely the work that preceded this gig—showed most in the corners, and deepening grooves of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “It’s my job,” Gil repeated as I sipped my complementary coffee, “my job to show you these offers, and explain what’s available to you.” His glasses never fell from his nose; his complexion almost grew more pale as I grinned. His starched dress shirt seemed to help him stare me down and read my smile: “So let me do my job,” he said as he rose from our small table. I waited as he consulted with his boss, about the best timeshare vacation package to meet my leisure needs. Elsewhere in the large meeting room, fifty consultations like mine could have been taking place, but only two were: other sales associates sat around casually, preoccupied by cell phones, newspapers, and the gathering clouds in the gray northeastern sky, in the few days before Christmas.
The Poconos are a good example of contrived twentieth-century tourism: at the beginning of the 20th century, affluence meant affording to spend the summer at a resort hotel, with unparalleled amenities and natural beauty: these were built near racetracks (Saratoga Springs), bodies of water (Lake George), and places of recreation (golf courses and ski resorts in the Poconos). After passing requisite strip malls and gas stations surrounding the highway’s off ramp, I pulled in to Wyndham’s Welcome Center beside Route 209. The Welcome Center is one of those buildings that one could mistake for a large house, were it not for the large parking lot and trickle of foot traffic. The Welcome Center serves as the gateway to Shawnee Village, what was Pennsylvania’s first timeshare development, not far from where, in times much more difficult than these, General Washington chose a spot nearby on a Christmas night to cross his army in secret, and surprise the British. Before checking in and meeting up with Gil, I drove up and down the New Jersey side of the Delaware, seeking such an alternative crossing to I-80. I found only the temporarily-defunct infrastructure of a summer resort town: ice cream stands stood empty besides the semi-frozen river, while miniature golf courses got pocked by small blankets of drifted flurries. An open liquor store had no cars in the parking lot; I wondered if the manager himself had scored a DUI during the sleepy off-season. I drove south, gained the attention of an elderly Belivdere, New Jersey police officer in an extravagant Cadillac Escalade™. He had followed me and my foreign license plate as far as he could; I kept going until I found myself among scant patches of farmland surrounding the Peach Bottom Nuclear Plant. I dreamed of Washington’s famous portrait in the boat made new, by having nuclear cooling towers pictured in the background; I imagined the remarkable size and possible mutations of vegetables produced by the fields through which I drove. Rolling back north through Belvidere again, I waved at the officer as I rolled slowly through a vacant crosswalk; he squinted to see where my green license plate was from, having been spattered and obscured by many dirt-road miles across New England. He kept his Escalade in park and didn’t wave back.
I had never considered purchasing any shares of any time; if I had been, Gil’s first and fatal flaw in his pitch came in his introduction, inside the preamble banter that preceded the hard sell: Gil had moved around a lot in life, between jobs and his children, who live in Massachusetts—“I’ve been staying in Belvidere while I’ve been here,” he told me. Among other jobs, Gil admitted that he had once worked for a pharmaceutical company. If peddling dubiously-beneficial medications was a racket that didn’t work out, I wondered how persuasive Gil had been, in the few months he’d been stationed at the Welcome Center, in peddling these virtual, and virtually intangible vacations. We both knew my immediate leisure—a voucher for three nights at the nearby Shawnee Inn—was already in my pocket. I sat and feigned no interest, but tried to look bemused as Gil pitched on about the virtues of The Security of Timeshares, of Deeds “In Perpetuity,” and of locations far more exotic than the one we faced right then: the grey afternoon of a Poconos Solstice. We both knew that, regardless of my decision to purchase or not, his cold return back across the Delaware that evening, like Washington, would be a short journey made alone: Gil would sleep having fought, and fought hard, and having gained some ground in the larger war, but having thoroughly lost the battle for my signature, and my promise of income to come.
After over an hour of jabber, a scrawling, frantic circular diagram regarding ownership and investment, Gil appeared to invent stories of he and his buddies getting a condo somewhere tropical; of he and his children at Disney in Florida; of a family reunion and lavish accommodations for over fifty in the Midwest. None of these delivered the response Gil was looking for, so slyly, as if fishing for some piggish streak in me, Gil paused before showing another resort from a catalog: “and this one, this was where I took my honey,” he said, and looked up to read my face. Were these true adventures or regurgitated fiction, taken from some sales associate manual, some encyclopedia of leisure-time ploys? Even the negotiation room’s climate was strategic: the blinds were drawn, hiding the casual holiday traffic that rolled by outside. Piped-in instrumental muzak kept us from anything but corporate concentration. We sat at a a few different tables for as long as we could both stand it; Gil first broke a sweat as he struggled to find a ball-point pen that really wrote, breaking his stride as he continued to add to his improvised and meaningless circular diagram.
I imagine the same corporate training manual that taught Gil about eye contact and persuasive fictional vacation stories contains a policy regarding the transport of potential customers in sales associates’ personal vehicles: after riding over to a model unit in Gil’s unkempt late 90s Chevy Impala, and squirming uncomfortably on his cracked leather seats as we drove the half-mile, I was far more interested in learning about Gil’s musical tastes, given clues of scattered and loose compact discs stuffed above the sun visor. Small talk grew more awkward in transit as I wondered, of the women he had mentioned to me, whose feminine handwriting graced his burned CDs of Dave Matthews Band and Hootie and the Blowfish.
We walked across the highest-class of condo available in the Wyndham Vacation Resorts’ glossy directory: a four-bedroom, sleeps-ten-plus, lavish suite. Each luxury bathroom contained not only a glass shower stall, but a private plastic-shell Jacuzzi tub; each kitchen cabinet and drawer was full of silverware, dishes, cups. Gil, and all the other agents looking to sell memberships, left the lights and television on in the showcase properties, so that one walks in to find what appears to be the set of something like MTV’s Real World, or other plasticized media garbage like Rehab House. The beds are made and the windows are dressed tastefully, simply—and the lights and television are left burning constantly in the model unit, because it’s worth the energy costs, to the global, multi-billion dollar corporate collaborative that is Wyndham. As Gil used his best words to describe how such accommodations provide owners a stability and ease in their choices of leisure, I wondered if anyone, ever, would truly reside, long-term and within their means, in the model unit itself. Ethically, someone had to, someday, I realized.
Gil and I parted ways, and I refused any of his offers. I sipped my third complementary coffee and displayed a new stoicism, waiting in a new office for the processing of my refusal. After his final plea I was bounced between a maze of associates and offers, ranging from reduced prices on timeshare packages, to a bizarre offer from Wyndham, completely separate from my recreation dollar: though his broken English made my understanding difficult, an associate asked if I’d contribute three thousand dollars to Wyndham today, and on a specified date in a few years Wyndham would return to me $10,000. As with all other offers, no paperwork was available, to take home and think about and review and make decisions upon—the immediacy of the deal was important to all those dressed formally, in pressed shirts and sharp power ties.
I went on to check in at Wyndham’s complimentary accommodations, at the Shawnee Inn, a mammoth and beautiful antique, built during a time when individuals’ and families’ recreation was framed quite differently than condominiums laden with MTV-style accommodations. The Shawnee, built in the early 1900s, sprawls to face the floodplain of the Delaware River. Its original owner, a New York City businessman named Charles Worthington, sought to establish the hilt of turn-of-the-century luxury, so much so that by 1910, the hotel’s restauraunt served products of its own dairy and creamery, vegetable garden, its own gravity-fed-spring water. The hotel ran a ferry that took guests across the Delaware, to a private nature sanctuary, and the golf course had its own Scotsman, who had his own sheep--not to mention Worthington, not unlike a Monopoly board, built two streets in the town adjacent to the hotel, allowing hotel workers to reside within walking distance of their job. Other attractions at the Shawnee fell away as the golf course gained reknown; because of Worthington’s meticulous attention to detail in running his hotel and golf course, the Inn’s website boasts that it’s likely the PGA was conceived in conversations that took place on the grounds of the Inn.
Worthington’s exclusive resort, however, was built on a clientele that stayed through the season; through the Great Depression and beyond, the hotel’s revenue suffered, becoming a summer-only destination. Skimping on maintenance over all else, the hotel was sold in 1943 to radio personality Fred Waring, a Lawrence Welk/Mitch Miller bandleader type, who was determined to make the Shawnee Inn thrive. Much of the 1950s took place here, it seems: the brass elevator gate on every floor stands defunct across from the modern equivalent, its car having carried Ed Sullivan, Art Carney, Jackie Gleason, Dwight Eisenhower, Bob Hope. The opulence of the winding staircase, the majesty of the lobby’s hardwood floor, and the wide, sweeping porches that extend and face the ever-creeping Delaware: none of these could be found on the ramp that led to Wyndham’s most lavish Poconos unit.
Gil’s persistence did not extend past our meeting, but his corporation didn’t give up on me or my income stream. I found myself in early May in Atlantic City, currently Wyndham’s only other Northeast Resort besides the Poconos and at a ski resort in western Massachusetts, shuffled again with free coffee into a second extended game of information, persuasion, and refusal. Gil was not there, but many more associates were: the stakes seemed higher as the sun shone and warmed up the resort town for summer.
It all made more (but not enough) sense in Atlantic City: the full size coffee pot, the complete kitchen, the two bathrooms and one master bedroom, the living space, the DVD player, the balcony with a tragically low railing and view north, to the Absecon Lighthouse and beyond, to the next barrier island up. Exploring closets and cabinets, I imagined returning back to such a contrived and habitable space—to cook one’s own meals, and live out an existence as best as possible, for however long such would be available.
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