Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

Crushed to the point of tears, after dozens of failed hit-ups, I asked Karma and Donna for help. Karma advised me to go ahead and cry; the only way to get through negative emotions, she said, was to feel them completely. Donna nodded in agreement. “Believe me, I’ve been where you are. It is hell .”

I made $17 in about five hours on A1A. In an additional hour or so at Riverwalk, where we joined the four men on our crew, I sold a single bumper sticker, for a single dollar, to the one party person who would give me the time of night: a gangly skateboarder with a jutting larynx and a lazy eye.

On Saturday, teaming with Karma and Donna again, I repeated my plea for help. Karma urged me to try to have fun. “It’s all energy! People want what you have when you’re having a good time.” Selling from about noon till 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., I made $54.

Sunday morning, in the van on the way to Las Olas, I begged to be tutored. “I get that selling’s all energy,” I said, as we crossed the causeway over glittering Biscayne Bay, “but I just feel like there must be specific techniques you guys could teach me.”

Rave—a power seller and Family Apprentice who’d spent five years at the Farm—glanced back at me from the shotgun seat. “I know what you need. Stick with me.”

I followed Rave to a spot on Las Olas well past the last of the white tents, where he could train me without provoking Fair security. He advanced to the edge of a hedged plaza in front of a bank (closed, since it was Sunday). I stayed back a few paces. We waited.

An older couple stepped through a break in the hedge and strolled our way. The man sported beige chinos, a cream-colored polo shirt, and a comb-over that could have been stitched from dental floss. The woman wore a toothpaste-blue pantsuit and had dyed-blond hair. Clearly, these were squares .

Rave, unfazed, plucked a We the Poet CD from his messenger bag, yanked the flap shut, and signaled me to pay attention. Then he bounded toward the couple, flashing a grin big enough to dazzle them both.

“Hey, check out our music!” He handed the woman We the Poet . On the cover was Arol in close-up, eyes shut midwail. High contrast and a shimmering overlay had stripped twenty years from her face. “It’s supercool rock and roll from our farm near Asheville. Like nothing else you’re gonna find down here.” He glanced at the man, then back at the woman. “Try it. You’ll love it.”

They would ? We the Poet was Arol’s debut as leader of the Zendik band. Her drummer, bassist, violinist, and guitarists were all skilled musicians, but Arol was a novice singer and lyricist whose improvised vocals skewed toward muddled incantation and shouted rant. Over the years, I would school myself to like her work, and Wulf’s: I would listen to their albums on repeat, comply with the tacit requirement that I compliment Arol on each new CD, and impute a Deathculture taint to all other songs. But in the beginning I simply didn’t like Zendik music—and wished I did, so I could sell more of it.

As the woman flipped the CD over to scan the list of tracks, Rave whipped out a sticker and mag and pressed them on the man. The mag’s newsprint cover showed Swan, nude behind a rippling scrim, caught at the midpoint of a mournful pirouette. Head back, lips parted, eyes shut, she seemed weary of the world’s gaze. For years she’d been cast as the starlet whose looks and gifts would sell the public on Zendik.

The man glanced from the mag to the sticker. His lips puckered into a chuckle. Rave blazed on. “As young people, we believe it’s our job to work for a better world—to put our ideas into action —instead of just whining about how bad things are.” He paused to let the man page through the magazine.

I noted the blandness of the language Rave used for his story of Zendik as grassroots Peace Corps. The night before, at Riverwalk, he’d been laying down hard lines, laced liberally with swear words: “We’re drowning in bullshit, the oceans are dying, and I’m supposed to take Prozac and get a fucking job ?” As a final flourish, he liked to clasp a hand to his throat, give a quick, strangled bark, and ask, “What are you gonna do—stock shelves at Kmart while Flipper chokes on plastic bags?” Rave, now twenty-one, had finished high school a year early so he could move to the Farm at sixteen. Later, he’d signed over his $4,000 college fund. He truly believed he was defending a planet in distress. What we Zendiks lost sight of was the vast, many-hued tapestry into which were woven both the black hole of working at Kmart and our own supposed white knighthood.

Rave raked his long, knobby fingers through his short, Norse-blond hair, making shocks of it stick up at crazy angles. “People help us out with donations,” he said. “Twelve to twenty for the CD. If you throw in twenty, you get the sticker and the zine.”

The man slipped the sticker inside the mag and handed it to the woman. Then he pulled out his wallet and gave Rave a twenty. Rave smiled, thanked them both, and waved as they resumed their stroll.

I was agog. I’d never seen a seller go straight for the big bucks, or so fully take control. Had Rave been born with the superpower of adamant self-confidence? Or was this a Zendik form of sorcery he could pass on to me?

Rave marched my way, pupils dilated with rising excitement. “Your turn, Hellion! Do what I did. Sell me a CD.”

I wiggled a mag at him. “Have you seen this?”

“No!” He grabbed the mag out of my hand. “Lead with the CD. And start with a command, not a question. You’re in charge here. Not them.”

I tried again, feigning enthusiasm. “Hey, check out our supercool rock and roll!” Maybe I didn’t have to like the music, or believe the squares would, to part them from their cash. Rave seemed to be saying he didn’t care if they liked it or not. Their role was to support us. By buying our stuff. And our role—as I’d heard Arol put it while rallying the troops—was to “shove it down their throats.”

Once I’d succeeded at “selling” Rave a CD, he sicced me on a couple in his-and-hers Hawaiian shirts. With him coaching me, in mime, from a few feet behind them, I felt my confidence surge. They bought a $5 mag. The next couple bought a double CD. It was as if Rave had sucked his persuasive power into a needle and shot it into me.

After selling a few more mags and a couple more CDs, I crossed over into the flow known as being “on” and stayed there all afternoon, savoring the intoxicating illusion that I could steer people to buy with my mind. My pants pocket bulged with a swelling wad of bills.

The art fair closed at five. We stuck around to hit up the diehards straggling back to their cars. Into gaps between hit-ups crept dread of the moment when my “on” spell would end. Though I felt power over my buyers, I felt no power over the power itself; I could no more cajole it to stay than I could prolong a date with Estero. I hoped, at least, to get off the street before it evaporated.

Finally, at six, Rave signaled me to quit.

Now we would count.

Crammed in the van together, thumbs sucking up the musk of sweaty ink and cotton, the seven of us wrangled our wads of cash in silence. As I smoothed, faced, and ordered my bills—sleek Jacksons, crisp Hamiltons, wrinkled Lincolns, worn Washingtons—I wondered how my number would compare with the others’. Only Rave and I were in high spirits. There was a chance I’d made more than he had. Could it be that I, once paralyzed by shyness, had come from behind to best everyone?

As a freshman at Dominican Academy, I’d lived for the days when Mrs. Gilleaudeau, our most demanding teacher, handed back biology exams, starting with the lowest grade and climbing to the highest. The prize of bitter admiration, of acid stares at the lockers, went to whoever received her exam back last. I never questioned the competition’s premise. I almost always won the prize.