Downstairs in the showroom Fat Jack was holding another conference with the salesmen, who were doing all the listening, Fat Jack all the talking, as was the case at least once a week, or when business was especially bad – and it always was. Business was never good. Ask any merchant. Business is always bad. Here, every day is our last. We’re always going out of business.
“Another pep talk,” groaned Morris Silver out of hearing range, though it always turned out that Fat Jack heard everything.
“When he was in diapers,” Morris Silver said, “I was selling burial plots door-to-door in Price Hill and all around this town, making a mint off those suckers. I was selling holes in the ground, understand! Holes in the ground! Now THAT’S selling. No young pischer talks to me about being a salesman. When he was crawling on this very table I was the first member of the Million Dollar Club here. I outsold Harry Himself.”
Harry Monocle was owner and founder of Harry’s Carpet City and was usually referred to as Harry Himself.
Anyway, Morris Silver hadn’t had a million dollar year in quite a while, like never again, for example. His best years were behind him, as opposed to, say, young Phil Coleman, one of three members of last year’s Million Dollar Club, who had received a medal, from Harry Himself, for his million dollars worth of sales. He was an ACHIEVER.
Phil Coleman, sometimes known as Hot Shot, said, “Give the kid a chance. He’s paid his dues.”
Which was true. Back when he was still making calls, Fat Jack was the best carpet salesman in the business.
A true salesman, Harry Himself always said, is a person who sells you what you need, and what you don’t need. That’s a true salesman.
“Bar none,” Fat Jack was saying to the assembled about his preeminence, speaking in that loud raspy voice, using his arms for emphasis and fingers for exclamation marks, much in the frantic style of Harry Monocle himself, who no longer did the day-to-day… but when he used to, boy could he give pep talks! Salesmen from competing shops used to sneak in just to get a whiff of that fire and brimstone. Everything Fat Jack knew came from Harry Himself. Harry Himself was a legend in the carpet business, now mostly retired, or rather, like God Himself, lofted to the upper heavens. In this case the fourth floor.
Harry Himself was a genius, the Einstein of sales. Even half retired, he still kept up, always suggesting new slogans and campaigns. When the Ohio River washed up miles away, he came up with a Flood Sale, though nothing here flooded, of course. He liked to say… BAD TASTE IS GOOD BUSINESS. That was his motto. Well, he had many mottos.
Actually, who could argue? He was a success, wasn’t he? Who can argue with success? That’s what people say.
There’s no arguing with failure, either.
“That’s right,” Fat Jack was saying. “I could outsell you bums blindfolded, hands tied behind my aching back, and that includes you Phil, and Jake, and Roger.” The Big Three. Send them out on a lead for a lousy bedroom measurement and they came back with an order for wall-to-wall, the essence of selling what wasn’t needed. “Don’t laugh,” Fat Jack was saying. “That’s why Harry Himself made me manager and not you. Because I was the best. I’m still the best. You guys – what are you? Order takers?”
Now THAT was an insult, along the lines of calling a doctor a quack, a lawyer a shyster – only this was much worse, for an order taker was nothing more than a clerk, a guy who only sold what you needed. Where was the skill or the thrill in that – or the money? Or the pride? Or the SUCCESS!
“If I’m insulting you,” Fat Jack was saying, “good.”
Of all the salesmen here, standing at attention, no one was more insulted than Old Lou Emmett whose reputation differed from the Big Three’s in that when he had a great lead and went out for a wall-to-wall job he usually came back with a bedroom sale, and sometimes worse, like nothing.
But it wasn’t always that way.
So Old Lou piped up:
“I’ve been in this organization thirty-five years and never has anyone called me an order taker.”
Fat Jack smiled along with everybody else, seeing Old Lou getting himself so riled, stuttering and sputtering, a bad thing, since Lou had had a heart attack, and then on top of that, a stroke, so that now he was only a fraction of his old self. He could barely walk and talk, but still went out on calls out of the bigness of Fat Jack’s heart. He was the company’s charity case. The good thing and the bad thing about Lou was that he refused to acknowledge his diminished faculties and even denied, to himself and to the world, that he had been the victim of a heart attack, and a stroke. (Weeks apart.)
So nobody mentioned it to his face, that he was a cripple, except Fat Jack, of course. Fat Jack…Fat Jack had no couth. People shook their heads and rolled their eyes when they saw Old Lou shuffling by. (No cane for him.) Well, a few of the salesmen, like Phil Coleman, and even some customers, actually made fun of him, upon the assumption that they were immune from infirmity and old age. Some people thought those things only happened to Lou Emmett. (Just wait, Lou used to whisper to me. Everybody gets a turn.)
“I used to be big,” said Lou in front of everybody. “I’m still big.”
“I didn’t mean you,” Fat Jack said humbly, about Lou’s being an order taker, and it was some doing for Fat Jack to be humble.
“You got that right,” said Lou, as everybody smiled and snickered.
“We all remember you in your days of glory, Lou. We REALLY do.”
Old Lou wasn’t finished. “Nobody but nobody was my equal.”
Nobody But Nobody was Fat Jack’s TV ad campaign, as in “Nobody but Nobody Undersells Harry’s Carpet City.”
Fat Jack got that from Harry Himself, of course, another of Harry’s mottos.
“In your day,” said Fat Jack, getting less humble.
“What do you mean my day?” said Old Lou. “I’m as good today as I ever was.”
“That’s right, Lou. Now let me finish with these bums.”
“Can I help it,” said Lou, “if I get lousy leads? The bottom of the barrel? That’s all I get.”
All eyes turned to me. “You hear that, Eli?” Fat Jack said, eyes bright with wickedness and humor. How he loved to rub it in!
“I heard,” I said.
“We need those leads from you, Eli.”
“You’re getting them.”
“My men are STARVING, Eli,” Fat Jack said in a flourish.
“They’re getting leads.”
“I mean verified leads.”
“We’re verifying them.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Well you’ll have to do better, Eli. We need Hyde Park wall-to-wall, not Over the Rhine linoleum. Get some new broads up there, or something. Fresh blood. Whenever I see them, that crew you’ve got up there now, they’re going to the bathroom. That’s time, time wasted. They spend more hours in the john than upstairs in your boiler room.”
He had me there, but there really was no cool way to tell girls not to go to the bathroom.
Besides, it was against the law.
Go ahead, tell a woman she can’t go to the bathroom, no matter how often she goes.
Fat Jack, back to the room at large, resumed: “We all have to do better. These are tough economic times. You’re all lucky to have a job, thanks to Harry Himself and his generosity. There is only one way to survive. SELL, SELL, SELL! Otherwise you die. It’s not like the old days when you could just…”
Everybody always talked about the old days, as if there really were such a thing.