C Hribal - The Company Car

Our father played well in the Midwest. He was as at ease and as welcome on the shop floor as he was in the lab as he was in the manager’s office. The managers—floor bosses booted upstairs along about the time their kids had college tuitions due—appreciated him. Our father knew where they liked to eat, and while he was treating them to ribs and beer he asked about their kids, groused with them about OSHA and Indian fishing rights, expressing his political views so that it always seemed he was agreeing with whatever was being said, whether the talk went conservative or libertarian or, occasionally, populist Democrat (but never, never liberal, not even in the early seventies, when conservatism momentarily dipped in popularity). He was one of them, as if on a given Monday they had woken up and decided to go into sales. He even looked like them, a collection of walking bulges, his shirts and pants sagging off him with all the accrued weight of what he’d stuffed into them, including a wallet so fat with business cards and membership cards and oil company credit cards that he had to keep it closed with a rubber band.

It irked the Dinks, I’m sure, that they were being represented by a lout in a bolo tie, and that they were paying him commissions he was sure to blow on fishing tackle and more of those goddamn string ties.

So they gave him shit territories, got him on straight commission while he was building up a territory, then when he had built it up, they cut the commission rate or raised his quota. Eventually they’d take that territory away from him, give it to some young buck straight out of college, and that kid would run it into the ground but look good doing it. So good they’d end up regional sales manager—the guy our father reported to. Our father hated those kids. They couldn’t talk jackshit to the guys on the floor, and when it came to selling didn’t know their asses from holes in the ground. Meanwhile our father would be given a new shit territory—probably a territory he’d built up earlier, had stripped from him just as it was starting to pay off, then run into the ground by some goon just out of college, and the cycle would repeat itself. It went on like this for years. When our father couldn’t stand it any longer he’d quit, go to some other company—usually one that was shaky in its products and/or its distribution—and stay with them for a year, eighteen months, until either the company folded or our father’s old boss called, worried about his hemorrhaging territory, and lured our father back with promises of base salary and 12 percent commissions he could only half-deliver on.

It was painful watching this happen. Even when we were too young to understand much, we understood our father was getting a raw deal, and it got worse as he got older, when the Dinks would really rather not have him around to pay him his retirement.

I could see the suits’ side of things, too—how could they stomach this paradox? This fat, loud galoot who—damn it—knew how to sell things. It just wasn’t right. Imagine, those barbarians taking a shine to this barbarian.

What our father most wanted, as his career wound down and he tired of the nine-hundred-mile, the eighteen-hundred-mile business trips, was to put an end to the grind of it. To keep working, but as an in-house consultant. To be recognized for his many years of loyal service and superior sales figures and to be honored—enshrined, really—in what might be considered the Peddlers’ Hall of Fame. A consultancy, to teach the young bucks right out of college how to recognize their asses from holes in the ground. To ditch the suit and tie once they checked into their motel—save that for meetings with the Dinks in New Jersey—and to put on a sport shirt and some steel-toed wingtips with comfortable soles. Those three-hundred-dollar Italian numbers that look exquisite in Chicago don’t look so hot when they’ve been soaking in debarking brine for a few hours and have dried wood pulp sticking to them. He’d instruct them to get a fishing license and to keep extra rods and reels in the trunk—or better, strung on special carriers inside the station wagon because you never know who wants to go fishing on his lunch break or after work. He’d tell them to lose the sedan and get a station wagon (or later, a truck or minivan or SUV), because even if you don’t have family, it’s smart to look like you do, and you need the space for hauling. To lose your East Coast affiliations for sports teams and start getting familiar with the rosters of the Packers, the Vikings, the Bears, and the Lions. And to be prepared to accept some good-natured ribbing on your lack of knowledge of the same.

He’d tell these guys where to stay, what to pack, who to talk to before you talked to “the guy in charge,” and who to talk to after. He’d introduce them to the guys on the floor, give them anniversary dates and the wives’ names and the kids’ birth dates and years in school. What these guys liked to drink and where they liked to eat. He’d explain about CB lingo, how to be the back door for a lead semi, and why it was better to be the back door than the front door, or even to be sandwiched in between, and how it might be wise not to have a handle taken from Shakespeare. Pinhead and Gravy Train were good CB handles. Tybalt and Mercutio were not.

He would explain why the biggest highways were not necessarily the fastest, why 29 was a better bet than the wider, more heavily trafficked 10, with its deer herds that seemed to live by the highway, waiting for cars to leap out at. He would tell them to visit Hayward’s Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame, Rhinelander’s Hodag Festival, Portage’s Buffalo Chip Throwing Contest. They should enter wagers on ice-out contests, take up deer hunting (easier with a shotgun than with an auto), go to church festivals and tractor pulls. It went without saying to join the Legion if they were eligible, the Kiwanis, the Elk, the Moose.

“This is important,” he would tell them. “Pay attention, you might learn something.”

He would explain how being on the road was all about attitude. Mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter. (Ba-dum-dum.) Attitude. How to handle the dark nights of the soul. How to roll into a town where you know absolutely nobody and make the town sing your tune.

The miles, the miles, how to fill the empty miles. All that green going past—woods, fields, marshes. White birch, yellow corn. The clover purple in its blooming. Blue lakes, blue skies. White clouds you notice only once in a while. It’s a static picture you’re driving into, and then it changes. Different formations, different clouds, not fields you’re rushing past but trees. After a while you’re not moving, the scenery is. The land itself is hurtling past. Astonishment on the faces of the villagers checking their mail once they realize the ground beneath their feet is moving at sixty-seven mph, with them on it, and the car zooming past is actually standing still. You tell the neophyte sales rep about the lazy streaker in Chicago who stood at a rail crossing minus his clothes and flashed the commuter trains that way. “It’s all relative,” says our father. He won’t wait before adding, “Get it? Einstein? The theory of relativity?” The new kids roll their eyes. No doubt to them our father’s routines sound old even if they are hearing them for the first time.

Which was part of our father’s genius. His jokes, booming laugh, and hail-fellow-well-met schtick played well. The boys out East wanted panache, polish. The people our father called on wanted regularity, someone who looked like he was not from out of town. Our father was a known quantity, right down to his mimeographs of “What to Do in the Event of a Nuclear Explosion: 1. Spread Legs. 2. Place hands on ankles. 3. Bend over. And 4. Kiss your ass good-bye.” He could tell the sales rep in training, “The boys in the lab like it if just before a trial you quote Einstein.”