Clancy Martin - How to Sell

She was correct. I was disoriented and my mouth was dry. For a minute longer I tried to seem lively. Then I gave up and rested the side of my face against the cold, pleasant glass of the dark limousine window. I watched the long stripes of snow and the frozen highway outside. We were in the fast lane passing cars on our right. Everyone else was driving slowly and unsurely in the snow. Like they were walking and we were skiing past.

“Texans,” Jim said. “You all right, buddy? Have another bump and then maybe take a little break. We’ll stop for lunch after Granddad’s and you can have a beer. That always helps me when I’m a bit coked up. A beer is what you need. Still getting over the flight, I bet. He’s always had a nervous stomach,” he explained to Lisa. “Can’t fly worth a damn, can’t get on a boat. Can’t even ride in the back seat of a car.”

“I’m okay,” I said. “Really I’m fine. I feel great.”

“Close your eyes for a minute,” Lisa said. “Hey, why don’t you come sit by me?”

That sounds like a very good idea, I thought. I looked at Jim, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was smiling like he was simply excited to see me. I switched seats, leaned back, and closed my eyes.

“That’s enough for right now. There’s no hurry. You could put your head in my lap if you like.” Did she say that or was I already asleep? I was not sleepy, though. But with my eyes closed and my head lying back in the already-hot-again car it seemed like I had disappeared.

“Relax and we’ll be there before you know it. Take off your tennis shoes,” she said.

No, I was wide awake. I did not want to take off my shoes because my socks were wet with sweat. I did not want Lisa to smell my feet. I am in the United States in a limousine with my head on the legs of a woman with black hair, I thought, and her fingernails on my eyebrows and ears. I opened my eyes again to look at her.

“Close your eyes. We’ll be there soon.”

“You’re spoiling him.” Jim laughed. “It’s not fair.”

“Let him go to sleep. You don’t have to torture him all the time. That’s how my brothers always were.”

“Still, you are kind of boyish,” Jim said.

“It won’t work. I am playing with Bobby right now,” Lisa said. Her fingernails scratched an itch I didn’t know I had deep in my scalp. “Rest a minute.”

I could not fall asleep but I pretended I had. I did not like to deceive her. But I wanted her to keep on talking in those same words.

T he hands on the watches in a showcase are motionless. Even with the quartz watches you withdraw the crown so that the watch will stop and the battery will last. It stimulates the customer when you give an automatic watch a twist before placing it on his wrist and it begins to run. Popping in the stem with a quartz has the same effect.

My first job at Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange was setting the Swiss watches at ten past ten. With automatics the hands are still unless the watch is moved, and winders you only wind every few months, so that the oil does not settle and clog the movement. They are set at ten to two because years ago Rolex began displaying their watches in photographs with the watches set at that time. If you try different hand positions on the watches you will see they got it right. A watch looks best set at ten to two. Many years after this a Rolex man in Zürich, Switzerland, told me that the V made by the hands is V for Victory. “But it does not work in German,” he said, and laughed.

At the end of the day in any jewelry store many of the watches have been shown and so their hands have moved, which means that in the morning someone must reset them. Also the automatics may be quickened into motion by being shuffled in and out of the cases. They rest in trays, and the trays are placed in plastic tubs that stack when you put them in the safes. They move again when you remove them from the safes in the morning.

Another task was polishing the brass numbers that were kept on the table at the entrance to the store. As you entered you saw a tall, narrow hexagonal table, about as high as your bottom rib. The table was elaborately constructed of long brown and white steer horns and darkly stained, brightly lacquered cowhide straps. The top was a solid piece of polished cherrywood. On the table was a brass stand, and on that stand hung two hundred brass plates, each about the size of a regular Christmas card, with numbers on them in black enamel from one to two hundred. To get a salesman or saleswoman you had to take a number, like at the seafood counter at the grocery store. That’s how frantic the store would get. “Like a shark pit, Bobby,” Mr. Popper once told me with delight. “That’s why I do the free giveaways in the paper. You have to create a feeding frenzy. Who wants to eat in an empty restaurant? It’s un-American. They got to fight for it. That’s the secret of marketing, Bob. Like stags in the rut.” I made sure these numbers were all in order in the morning and I polished them at night before we went home.

•

T he front-of-the-house was the glamorous half of the store but, as in a restaurant, the real work was done in back. That’s where the safes were, and the phones, and the steam cleaners and the stand-up polishing wheel, and Jim’s and the other managers’ desks. Their trash cans had to be emptied every morning.

“You’re doing a great job on the front,” Jim told me, after my first week. I vacuumed the carpets, and cleaned butts out of the sand-filled ashtrays with a slotted spoon. We had a wooden hand press you used to flatten the sand and make a diamond imprint in it once the butts were out. “Everybody says so. But you have to take the same care with the back-of-the-house,” Jim said. “That’s what Popper will really notice. Take special care of his office and his stairs.”

I vacuumed the stairs to Mr. Popper’s office every morning before the store opened. In the darkened stairwell yellow light shone from beneath the door and, with the security of his extra lock, which opened with a special key like a credit card, it seemed like the cave of Aladdin, or the lair of a sleepy dragon.

One morning, two weeks after I started, I was on the stairs on my hands and knees when I felt a tap on my back. I looked up and saw Mr. Popper.

Mr. Popper was short. He had a round white face and a huge potbelly. He was wearing a pink Hermès tie. He always wore Hermès ties, which were purchased for him by his wife, Sheila, who was hated by everyone at the store. Except for Jim, because he did not hate anyone, and because she had made Jim her protégé.

“Good morning there, young fella,” Mr. Popper said.

I wondered if I should turn off the vacuum cleaner or keep vacuuming. Mr. Popper held his green ostrich cowboy hat in his hand. The hat had a feather.

Mr. Popper gave me a look and I realized I was blocking the stairwell. So I turned off the vacuum cleaner, stood, and pressed myself against the wall.

I was pleased that now Mr. Popper knew who vacuumed his stairs.

I t was not what you think of when you think of a jewelry store. There were not those stretched-out, noiseless, frightening afternoons we would come to know later, in our own store, when only one or two customers wandered in — tire-kickers, you understood with a look — and waved away the salespeople, rubbed their sweaty fingers across the top of a clean showcase or two, and then walked out again without asking even to see a wedding band or a pair of diamond studs. There was always business in The Store. We had more customers than salespeople. And we had lots of salespeople. Nearly one hundred, during the season, when Mr. Popper brought in college students from TCU and SMU. All day, every day, there were boxes being wrapped, receipts being written, credit card machines singing. When we opened in the morning it was like a soccer game in South America or the first morning of the new school year.