Sales, like any form of work, was a means of survival. And as with most other means of survival, the average human being couldn’t make it to the end of the month, but only approximately to day fifteen. From then on, the human being was obliged to fall back on his friends, on cheques with thirty-day clearances, on pawnshops, and on moneylenders, the latter only in extreme cases. It happened to everybody, D included.
Smaller-scale strategies were added to the general ones and, all told, served the overall objective to survive.
These ploys were carried out every day and had slight variations, depending on the trade. In the case of sales, they functioned roughly like so:
INVOICES
This strategy was viable in coffeehouses, restaurants, and even hotels. In the final two was where it really paid off. It was very simple: in the invoice description, you changed one coffee to two, one lunch to two, one night’s stay to two. The company paid your expenses and, without knowing it, your partner’s as well.
Because the complicity of all parties was required, generally this was only done in the coffeehouses, restaurants, and hotels that were frequented by traveling salesmen.
Some refined these strategies. I remember a hotel that also ran a clothing store. Sweaters, overcoats, boots, shirts, and ties were sweetly camouflaged under the concept of three nights’ stay, when really it had been one.
We left the hotel warm and triumphant. This wasn’t theft; it was tiny spoils from the war that all human beings must unleash against the system that oppresses them. So thought the intellectuals who, from a coffeehouse, had observed the world’s workers. We, in another coffeehouse, hadn’t thought it, but we knew it in the bottom of our just-as-tiny hearts. This wasn’t theft. And even if it had been, we wouldn’t have cared.
ROAD TOLLS
The Reimbursement of Expenses Strategy had a fundamental problem: you had to account for the expenses.
Every week D had to send off a spreadsheet detailing invoices from hotels, restaurants, and—this was the most complex point—road tolls.
While there existed a circuit of hotels and restaurants that were prepared to falsify invoices, turning a road concession system to our advantage was simply beyond all possibility.
What we did, if we wanted to justify a trip we hadn’t taken, was simple: the next time we passed by the toll booth, we parked the car on the highway verge and searched for the receipts that had been tossed out the window by people who traveled without accounting for their expenses.
The procedure was carried out judiciously. No more than one or two days could pass between the road toll you wanted to claim and the day you searched for it, because, after that point, the receipts would blow a long way down the highway, or they would be in poor condition due to the summer sun or winter rain.
Likewise, it wasn’t worth getting too close to the road. We searched for the scraps of paper on the verge only, otherwise you ran the risk of getting hit by a car. And if that happened, it would be impossible to explain to my mother what I’d been doing hunting for scraps of paper on the side of the road on a school day. She was an absent mother, but that didn’t mean we should abuse the fact.
No doubt she wouldn’t have understood the quid pro quo or the parallel education system because, as D said, my mother was a sensitive woman, or the closest thing to sensitive we’d ever known. My mother was beautiful, and goodness and beauty were one and the same. “Scholastic philosophy said so, and last week’s Selections from Reader’s Digest did too,” D continued. But I’d stopped paying attention.