Clancy Martin - How to Sell

“Son. Let me see that watch, there, son. That big daddy there. The gold one.”

I was Windexing the Rolex case. It was Monday morning after the weekend Halloween sale. I had done the trash, the ashtrays, and the vacuuming but I was behind on the showcases because Jim had sold one hundred and eighty thousand over the weekend, so he slept in and we drove in late.

“We’ll get there at nine,” he had told me. When I woke him again fifteen minutes later, nervously, he said, “Nine-thirty. Take the car if you want. Maybe I’ll take the day off.” I saw his coke next to the bed and because I could hear his wife, my sister-in-law, Lily, downstairs in the kitchen I quickly did a line myself and then made him a line and fed it to him. After a minute he sat up in bed and said, “Cut me another one of those, would you? Go ahead and have one yourself if you want.” I cut us both two fat lines and he did one and said, “I’ll save that one for after my shower.” I did two more small lines while he was in the shower and tapped a couple of bumps into a piece of foil from his pack of cigarettes for later. Lily met us at the bottom of the stairs in her blue flannel pajamas. They had sheep and rabbits on them. I had had a crush on her for years but now that I lived with her she held less interest. She smoked too much and her teeth were yellowing. She had thin lips and large, clumsy hands. But when I looked at her I also thought about how I once saw her in her underwear leaving the bathroom after a shower. Her hip bones were narrow and angular against the cotton of her white underwear. Her face was wide but the bones of her skull were visible beneath her wet hair.

“Are you two going to be coming home late tonight? Should I make some dinner? I was thinking of roasting a chicken.”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. “The same as always, I guess. If that’s late. We’ll eat at work.”

“Well, I can’t eat a whole chicken by myself.”

She smiled at me and then frowned at Jim.

“You look nice this morning, Robert,” she said. She bent over and rubbed her thighs. Her breasts swung beneath her pajama top. Then she crouched and stretched out her arms like a bird. “I need to get a job, Jimmy. My muscles are sore. I’m bored. I don’t have anything to do except smoke pot and exercise all day.”

“You don’t have a green card yet,” Jim said. We both had green cards because our father had got them for us when he first moved to Florida. He guessed, correctly, that we would want them later in life.

“I want to go home, then,” she said. “I want to see my parents.”

“Maybe after Christmas,” Jim said. “Or you could go anytime, I guess. We’ll be all right.” He grinned at me. It was a very brotherly grin.

“You two stay out of trouble today,” Lily said. “Don’t let my husband boss you around too much,” she said to me.

Then we were in the car, coming west on I-30 in the rush-hour traffic we normally missed because we drove in before dawn, and there was downtown Fort Worth bright in the morning sun.

“Come on, son, get with the program! Ain’t you had your coffee yet this mornin’? I want to see a watch! That gold one there. That there Rolex. The big one.”

I didn’t have case keys. I knew if I went to borrow a set of keys whoever I borrowed them from, even Jim, would ask me why I needed them, and then if I said there was a large black man in a red suit with three gold teeth and a white tie with a diamond tie stud at the Rolex case who wanted to look at a men’s President I would be back to Windexing cases and someone else would be selling him. The reason I didn’t have case keys was that I was not on the sales floor yet. They didn’t even let me work the phones. But then I saw the case was open. All of the cases were open. One of the last things you did before opening the doors in the morning was push all of the locks on the showcases. But this whole side, even the men’s jewelry, all the way to the diamond room, stood open.

The men’s President Rolex was displayed on the beige suede stand in the original walnut box all the men’s Presidents were housed in. It had the silver plastic crown on its gray silk cord and the original green hanging tags. Underneath the suede stand, I knew, were the original warranty, books, and authenticity papers. I handled the heavy watch carefully. I had almost dropped it as I slid it from its stand.

“This one, sir?” I asked, and handed him the watch. I did not know to unbuckle it before handing it to him, and I did not know that it was short-links so that it would not close on his thick wrist.

He smiled at the watch. He slipped it onto his fingers. Then he turned it and looked at the back of the bracelet.

“What’s the trick? How do you get it open?” he asked me.

“They call that an invisible buckle, sir,” I said. “See that crown there? That little gold crown? Just flip that with your finger.”

He struggled with the bracelet of the watch for a moment and then popped it open with his thumbnail. I took a quick look around the showroom but no one seemed to be paying us any attention. Seven or eight customers browsed the diamond jewelry counters. Lisa was showing cluster rings to a fat woman with white hair, a tall man in a cowboy hat picked malachite, lapis lazuli, and rose quartz beads at the bead board, and a young man with two children stood patiently at the buy counter. His baby cried from the little home in a backpack on his father’s chest. There were only three salespeople on the floor — everyone was still in back eating donuts — and it was so early we had not even put out the brass numbers.

I looked back at my customer and he had the watch on his wrist. He was trying to close it but it wouldn’t fit.

“I didn’t figure they made these things so damn little.”

“You have got a big wrist,” I told him. “You’re lucky. Look at it on me.”

I took the watch from him — something I would never have done a year later — and placed it on my own wrist and closed it. It hung there like a hoop. I shook the watch around my wrist.

“See that?” I said. “I would love to own one someday. But I could never wear one even if I could afford it. You need a man’s wrist for one of these. My father always teases me about my wrists. He used to be a boxer. But really he’s got these same girlish wrists I’ve got.” I took the watch off and handed it back to him. “It looks silly on me. I mean, it makes me look silly. It looks proper on you.”

He slid the watch back on again. It almost fit his wrist with the buckle open. It would take five more links to fit him properly, I figured. I knew how to fit the links. You always started with fewer than you thought you needed. But this man’s wrist was enormous.

“How’s it feel?” I asked him. “I was surprised the first time I held one, how heavy they are.” That weight, the heft of quality, is part of the pitch.

“What did you say is the price on this watch? Is this the one I saw advertised in the paper?”

We were selling men’s Presidents for four thousand nine hundred and ninety-five dollars. $4,995.00. They were selling down the street at Waltham’s — Fort Worth’s registered Rolex dealer — for eleven thousand eight hundred. I did not know the details yet. I thought we were simply more honest and competitive. I thought we were just the best deal in town. That’s what I told him, too.

“That’s the one. Yes sir. Forty-nine ninety-five. A brand-new Rolex men’s President, solid eighteen-karat gold, lifetime warranty.”

You spend the rest of your career trying to recapture that innocence. Sinlessness and candor like that is a fierce advantage. But you can’t fake it.

“So your old man was a boxer,” he said, rolling the head of the watch through his fingers. “He must have had a few pounds on you,” he said, and laughed. “Well, you going to save me any money on this watch, son? What’s the best price? You ask the boss-man what his best price is for cash money. If you can save me a little money I think I’ll take this one home.”