I HAVE HAD A good deal of experience in stores. For instance, department stores:
I have accompanied a wealthy couple through Dallas’s Neiman-Marcus (which meant fighting off little squeezes from floorwalkers); have been collared falsely and accused of shoplifting at Christmastime by a temporary store detective, a nervous middle-aged woman, on Lenox Square (which gave me the only opportunity of my life so far to say, “There must be some mistake!”); and have bought a plastic water-bottle (un eau-flacon plastique) in a big Brussels store that not long thereafter burned down.
Never, however, until one day a while back, had I been addressed by any salesperson as “Customer.”
I chanced one day to be walking past a dimly lit clothier’s, in a depressed area of the downtown, and noticed in the window some gum-rubber gloves coated with little bits of cork. They looked as though they had been rolled in crushed peanuts.
Somehow, they seemed at the moment to fill in my clothing needs a small void. I can’t remember the last time that I did anything in rubber gloves, but there must have been some critical moment in my early youth when I was holding on to something valuable with rubber gloves, and it slipped out because there were no bits of cork for traction.
There was a time in my boyhood, I remember, when I was fishing off a dock in Florida, and an old lady fishing near me brought in a little fish, a nice whiting, which jumped off the hook, and I leapt up to grab it for her, and it squirted out of my hands into the water and the old lady cried.
At any rate, I felt a need for the gloves, and since they were cheap I went inside.
“Some of those … cork-studded gloves … caught my eye …” I said to a saleswoman who was leaning against a counter.
“Find those in the basement, Customer,” she said firmly.
I did buy the gloves, but found no use for them until the wedding of my friends the Fants came up and I was able to slip them into the honeymoon luggage. More important, the “Customer” appellation struck me as a salutary convention; one that might well be widely applied.
Think of the hypocrisy that would be obviated, for instance, if it were established practice to say, “How about a little lunch with me Wednesday, Client?” Or “It’s been awfully good getting to know you, Contact.”
Then, however, I asked myself whether I could apply the practice to my own profession.
For instance, I talked to Little Richard, the rock-and-roll figure, on the phone some years ago. I think it was Little Richard.
Little Richard was certainly, or certainly allegedly, robbed in Atlanta, by his onstage valet, of $19,000 that he had in his hotel room in a sack, and since I happened to be on the police beat that day I called his hotel room to get the story.
But when someone answered, I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Little Richard?”
I couldn’t bring myself to say “Mr. Penniman?” either—which I knew from the police report to be his formal name. It is like interviewing baseball managers. “Herman” is too familiar, and “Mr. Franks” seems silly.
But neither, it occurs to me on reflection, would “Interviewee” have rung true. Or “Subject”—which would in theory have been appropriate not only as in “subject of an interview” but also as in the standard police-report usage: “Subject was located lying under bush and wouldn’t move.”
“Subject? This is a Reporter.”
No, it is too cold.
The human element must be trafficked with. Or one must be a monk, or open a dimly lit store.