C Hribal - The Company Car

You know? Now? It was six o’clock on a Saturday evening. Had our parents no sense of decency? Decorum? They did and they did not. Our parents reminded us at that moment of Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows of The Honeymooners. When Ralph, after flying into one rage after another, and generally mucking things up royally, is finally forgiven and brought to rights by Alice, he is invariably flummoxed and perhaps mortified, but he is also thankful. “Alice, you’re the greatest” was that show’s tagline, and it didn’t matter that Alice was a true beauty and Ralph a blustery buffoon. Something happened between them behind those closed doors that was good and healing and was worth staying together for. You didn’t get that feeling with the Petries and their twin beds, or the Nelsons, whose bedroom you never saw. The singular magic of Ralph and Alice Kramden was that, babies or no, they had sex when that door closed at the end of the show. And they had it at Alice’s discretion. For all Ralph’s blustering, she held the reins of power in that relationship. And don’t think Ralph didn’t know it. It was part of what made him an impotent blowhard. He had to flex his muscles meaninglessly at least once an episode just to convince himself he was in charge even though he wasn’t. And even as little kids we could see that about our parents as well. Ralph and Alice, Wally and Susan. “Alice, you’re the greatest,” indeed.

Our mother had a job, our father was despondent and emasculated, and our mother gave him her body to make him feel better. “I don’t deserve you,” said our father as our mother led him back to their bedroom, their fingers twined.

Said our mother, “No, Wally, you don’t.” And then right there in the hall she nibbled his ear. “We’ll put it on your bill, Wally-Bear. We will put it on your bill.”

“We’ll put it on your bill, Wally-Bear”? Since when did our mother start speaking in our father’s clichés? What did it mean, besides that our mother was going to keep her crummy little job as a cashier? It meant a great many things, chief among them that the balance of power was shifting in our family. Our mother, who never learned to drive and therefore was always along for the ride, was starting to feel as though maybe, for the sake of her family—no, for the sake of her sanity—she ought to be in the driver’s seat more often.

Not long after this our father started selling cookies for Pewaukee Cookie and Biscuit. PCB was a tiny company trying to go head-to-head with Nabisco. Their headquarters were in a quasi-bucolic upscale exurb of Milwaukee. Their advertising made you think fat rural bakers of German extraction pulled their wares from stone ovens on long-handled wooden boards, but the factory itself was in an industrial neighborhood in Milwaukee, where skinny black guys hopped up on speed ran the ovens, and large black and Hispanic women ran the packaging lines and brought home as freebies corner-kinked boxes and cello-wrapped packages with ripped seals.

Our father did, too. We ate trial-size samples, broken remnants, and date-expired rejects, boxes of crackers and packages of cookies accidentally sliced open by a packing knife. By this time I’d had a summer job for several years replacing Nabisco cookie salesmen when they went on vacation, so I knew the routine. When you met one of your counterparts from Keebler or Archway or Milwaukee Biscuit, you exchanged goodies. A packing knife’s slice rendered the package damaged, and that way you didn’t have to bring home the same crap you sold all day. But our father never did that. He refused to take the other guy’s stuff in trade. But why? I asked. “Because I work for PCB,” said our father. Pride, belief—our father’s gods did not die.

Even when he was selling cookies.

It might have saved him, having a job again, maybe even more than our mother leading him back to the marital bed. I can’t vouch for that. But I knew there was something desperate about selling cookies for a living, and it required our father to summon up his courage to go out each morning. What our father didn’t like was that it required no real selling. Everybody loves cookies, our father said, even the knockoff brands. There’s nothing to it. So our father set himself the task of stealing six or eight inches of shelf space from that juggernaut Nabisco. Nabisco, being a juggernaut, commands the cookie aisle’s center, and competing brands are shoved to the ends. Nabisco arranges their products using “bull’s-eye” marketing, meaning their popular stuff—Oreos, Saltines, Ritz crackers—go in the bull’s-eye center—and their own less popular sellers are out toward the fringes, further crowding their competitors’ products to the aisle’s ends. Our father wanted to change all that.

I “volunteered” to ride around on one of his sales trips. Given the precarious state he was in, our mother thought it “might be good” if one of us accompanied him, and I was the only one available. That summer I’d abandoned the white-collar world of Nabisco for the higher-paying drudgery of a canning factory, but it was closed because of a drowning in one of its cooling tanks. It wasn’t likely to start up again soon—drought had delayed the corn season—and by the time it was, I’d be back at school. I’ve no idea what our mother said to him privately, but to me our father said he wouldn’t mind the company. He even seemed pleased. Here was his chance to show how he could mentor a budding salesman. And his son to boot. For me this would be like a weeklong trip to the Office. The very idea thrilled and disgusted me.

We drove north up Highway 51. Our father chatted up the owners of Stop-N-Gos, Open Pantries, Bob’s Gas and Grubs, Millie’s and Izzie’s Canteen Stand, Roy and Margaret’s Bait and Grocery. We stopped at Indian souvenir stands with groceries attached, ditto bait shops and Quik Marts. Red Owls, Piggly Wigglys, and Sentrys, too. At the end of the day we crossed Highway 2 to Ashland, where we were booked into the Lorelei Motel. After dinner we walked down to the harbor and looked at the sailboats up from Chicago. “All that cocksucking money,” said our father, “and they buy sailboats.” Our father was a powerboat man, and this was the first time I’d ever heard him vent on the subject of money. He believed the rich deserved it, even when I pointed out that a lot of the wealth he saw was inherited. A grandfather in iron ore, a great-grandfather in timber. No matter. At some point somebody had done something to deserve it, by hook or by crook, and you could do worse than be born into a family of wealth.

“Al Capone had no children,” our father told me as we walked along. “No legacy, no heirs. That was his one great mistake. That and he let the feds get him on income tax evasion. He had cabins and hideaways all through the great north woods. Did you know that?”

I knew.

The next day was hot and hazy, and clouds were building up in the west. That meant rain, and we hoped it meant a break from the heat. The company car’s air conditioner was having a hard time keeping up with all our starts and stops. We’d visit a grocery store, write up a pitifully small order, then drive ten miles and do it again. Some of the towns we went through were paper mill towns. The muscles above our father’s jowls worked furiously as we drove by his old stomping grounds, but he said nothing.

We knocked off earlier than expected in Spooner. We had a couple more stops to make, but at a little crossroads grocery named Mel’s we ran into a young woman, a girl, really, running the counter. “Can we see Mel, honey?” said our father.

“Mel’s gone,” said the girl. She looked to be about seventeen. Pretty, the way girls in small towns are, a little stocky, her jeans tight, her pink T-shirt tighter, her black hair parted carelessly down the middle. She caught sight of me and grinned. I was new in town, and that meant I wasn’t the same old same old. “Fishing,” she added uncertainly. Then she smiled at me again.