Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“I don’t really want her as a customer. I mean, you can have her.”

“Bobby.” Jim looked at me earnestly. It was like the time on the bus when I was five and he caught me crossing my legs at the knee. “Boys never sit like that,” he had told me, staring me straight in the eye. Another one was, “Never start a fight, but never back down from one, either.” I don’t remember how that came up, because I was not in many fights. “Bobby. It is time to stop pretending to learn the business and really learn it. Do you want to make real money or not? Do you want to be a salesman? Yes or no?”

I didn’t think about my answer. I mostly wanted to get out from under that gaze of his. It was like a microwave. He did not use it often.

“Black Friday is in four days,” Jim said. “Black Friday you go on the floor.”

At that moment Lisa appeared, as though she had been listening to the whole thing, took the watch from my hands, and left with it. I understood she was going to wrap it for me. Often, this happened to me, when some angel descended to solve a problem, as if I were wired with a secret microphone. But she should have taken me with her.

“This is your first real season,” Jim said. “Christmas is expecting you. Come on, time to play Santa Claus. Santa Claus and his band of merry elves.”

That’s Robin Hood, I thought. But I did not correct him.

“Feel these shoulders,” he said. He massaged my shoulders from the front like a manager would massage his boxer’s shoulders. “That is too much tension. We have got to get you laid.

“Let’s get through the weekend and Sunday night we’ll pick up Lisa and one of her buddies and we’ll go have some fun. Lisa will know somebody. Let’s get through the weekend and we’ll get you a girl.

“Come on, go grab that watch and let’s get back in there,” he said.

T here was a bookstore on the edge of downtown that was open on Sundays. We were working seven days a week now, but we got off early on Sundays and if Jim and Lily were having a fight, or out shopping, I would drive over to the bookstore and then maybe leave my car there and walk into downtown for a hamburger and a Coke at Ted’s. It was a nice place to sit and read a new book that you had bought. The first time I read D. T. Suzuki I was sitting at the red linoleum bar in Ted’s, eating my french fries one at a time, with Tabasco mixed into the ketchup.

To get there I would walk a few blocks out of my way so that I could pass Lisa’s building. I thought she might be outside doing something, taking out the garbage, say, or looking up and down the street, or taking a walk herself, and then we would bump into each other and we could get a hamburger together or go sit in a bar I knew she liked and have a drink. But she never was outside her apartment. The whole street was always empty, in fact. Just parked cars and the brown brick buildings. I should have called her and asked her to meet me. But I was afraid to call her. I didn’t even know her number. She was always the one who asked me out, when we got together outside of the store.

J im had not given me any cocaine for several weeks, so Lisa had switched me entirely to her speed.

“This is healthier anyway,” she said. “You don’t know what’s in that cocaine. It goes through so many hands before it gets to Texas. But with crank it’s manufactured right here in Fort Worth. I know the guy who makes it. It’s practically like buying it at the pharmacy.”

I was leaving the customers’ bathroom, rubbing crank from the bottom of my nose with the side of my hand, when Mr. Popper caught me by the arm.

“Bobby,” he said. “Come on up here for a minute. Come on up to my office. We need to have a little talk.”

They must have a hidden camera in there, I thought. He’s been watching me on a monitor in his office. I had masturbated in that bathroom, too. I hoped he wouldn’t make me watch the tape. But I was going to be fired. Jim told me to be especially careful about drugs around Mr. Popper and Sheila.

“They are not hypocritical people,” Jim had said. “They aren’t Bible-beaters or anything like that. But they hate drugs. One time they did a big drug testing and they fired five or six people over it. They couldn’t fire everybody who tested positive or they would have had to find a whole new staff. Dennis and I tested positive, of course, and the Watchman, and a bunch of other people. They looked past it. But we all had to promise to quit, and watch a video about the dangers of narcotics. They even made us sign a contract. They brought in a couple of speakers from AA. It was a big deal. We had to read some of those damn AA comic books at our regular sales meeting. ‘Take them home,’ Popper said. ‘Commit them to memory.’ Comic books. You remember the ones. The same damn ones Mom used to bring home from her AA meetings. I’m just saying, because you’re you, be cautious.” So I knew I was fired. But it did not sound like they were the type to press charges.

Popper sat down at his desk. The banks of video monitors were flickering on his credenza beside him, and there were more behind him. I tried not to look at them. I wondered which one had caught me.

“I don’t know if you like to drink or not, Bobby. I am not much of a drinking man myself. But I will take a glass of good scotch from time to time. Have you ever tasted a good single-malt scotch? I go over to Scotland once or twice a year with a couple of buddies of mine, good old boys from the construction business here in town, and we play a little golf, go fishing for those powerful salmon they have up there, and hit the distilleries. They put you up in a castle. Here, you should try a glass. I drink it neat, but for your first taste you might want some ice and a splash of water.”

Mr. Popper stood, so I stood, too. He laughed.

“Sit down, son! Relax! Boy you Canadians come nervous. Your brother’s near half as jumpy as you are. You been up to something you don’t want me to know about?” He smiled. The way he smiled, like we were in on the secret together, made me think maybe he didn’t know about the drugs after all, or that if he knew he didn’t mind. I sat back down.

He poured the drinks at the bar on the other side of his office. It was a built-in bar, made of brass and beveled glass, and I had polished and cleaned it many times, always while Mr. Popper was working in his office and on the phone. I stocked it, too, with ice cream and diet sodas. Mr. Popper ate two or three pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream a day. All different flavors, though his favorite was strawberry.

“Here you are,” he said, and put the pretty, golden drink on the desk in front of me.

“Drink it slow. You don’t want to hurry through a liquor like that one.”

I took a sip. It was strong. But like warm caramel and honey. It was nothing like scotch I had tried before. Because of the richness of the flavor I thought of it as the first properly American liquor I had ever tasted.

“Bobby, some of us got a gift. I have it. Your brother has it. And watching you on that alexandrite deal…” He laughed. “That was some kind of deal, wasn’t it? I thought we were never getting rid of that sunuvabitch. The things my wife will buy. Anyway, observing you, I got a feeling you have it, too. An instinct for what the other fella needs to hear. What will clarify his own decision-making process for him. How to unify a man’s will.”

I knew he didn’t expect me to say anything. I took a swallow of my drink.

“Look here, Bobby. I’d like to show you something. Something special to me. You might find it interesting.”

He took a large red-and-gilt leather-bound book from a shelf beside his desk. It was the size of book you expected an old-fashioned Bible to be. It was obviously heavy and he carried it in both of his arms around the desk and laid it open in front of me. He turned through the thick, cream-colored pages. Inside he had glued copies of newspaper columns, pictures cut out from other books, newspaper ads featuring items from our store. Everything was jewelry.