The last person I wanted to see when I got back was Old Lou. Always after a get-together with Stephanie I wanted to be alone. Especially if it was a good one, so I could extract the gold, and especially if it was a bad one, where I could sort through the wreckage. This time, on the wreckage front, I was left with LIFE GOES ON. What a thing to say!
Even worse than Lou at a moment like this was Fat Jack. I had to pass the showroom on my way up.
Fat Jack was giving a speech.
Saying: “The most important thing in life is SELLING.”
He spotted me trying to sneak through the crowd. “This is for you too, Eli.”
Phil Coleman and the other salesmen smiled. They suspected I wasn’t one of them.
They thought I was a spy.
Maybe I was a spy to the extent that I loved to watch people and considered myself not above or beneath them, but merely detached, an observer, as any good actor had to be – and frankly, it amazed me that not all people were actors. What else made any sense? In my New York days I worked with a waiter named Big Stan who said he wasn’t, WAS NOT waiting on tables as a means to support an acting career. He was a waiter because he WANTED TO BE A WAITER. That was his profession. He was proud of his profession. Was it possible, therefore, that there were bus drivers who wanted to be bus drivers, and ditto for cabbies, construction workers, janitors, window washers, maids, valets, insect EXTERMINATORS, hatters, plumbers, carpenters – weren’t they all just biding their time until their agents gave them a call? Weren’t they all spies? Obviously not. I had it all wrong. Which was good. It would be a world without food and water if we all pursued the same task. Fortunately we all sorted ourselves out, like bees and ants, and went scurrying into different jobs and professions for the general GOOD. We thought we were individuals but all we did was supply the demand.
As for me, nature had decreed that there was a greater need for boiler room managers than for actors.
* * *
Fat Jack said every man here was behind on his quota… “And that’s the problem. The fact that you’re HERE. The fact that you’re here means that you’re not THERE. Outside. Selling.” It was understood that walk-in trade was never as lucrative as OUTSIDE; walk-in customers were usually in the market for something to cover the hallway – a lousy rug! Morris Silver could handle that by himself, if he wasn’t in the middle of a tall story. In the carpet business all that counted was wall-to-wall. “I want HUNGRY salesmen,” Fat Jack said.
Fat Jack was a terrific orator, maybe not of the Shakespearean cut, but he was a terrific speaker; you could tell that by the way he held his audience, in this case the sales force, spellbound. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word. If not spellbound, then every man here certainly was asleep, Morris Silver grumbling, “Same old garbage.”
Hot shot Phil Coleman whispered back, “Show some respect for the young.”
“Yeah the young,” said Morris. “You young guys. Yeah, you really know what it’s all about.”
Phil Coleman laughed. “You’re just jealous.”
“Yeah I’m jealous. I’m so jealous.”
What I liked about Morris Silver was how he disagreed with everything you said by agreeing with everything you said, a rare and wonderful skill. Like someone would say to Fat Jack, “That’s a nice suit you’ve got on.” Morris Silver would say, “Yeah, that’s some nice suit you got. Yeah, real nice.” Or someone would make a complimentary remark about the President of the United States and Morris Silver would say, “Oh yeah, he’s a champ. A real jewel.” In his own way, though, Morris Silver was a great thinker, equal to, say, Freud, as when he once told me, in fewer words than Freud ever used – in fact he summed it all up for Freud when he said, “For you guys, what more is there to life besides pussy?”
* * *
When I got upstairs Lou was already sitting at my desk. I told him the most important thing in life was selling. I said Fat Jack had challenged me to come up with something more important, like maybe ACTING, WRITING, LEARING, PHILOSOPHY, CULTURE in general, but I couldn’t come up with anything.
“You’re not being sarcastic, are you?”
No I wasn’t. I was becoming a believer.
“Maybe Fat Jack is right,” Lou said. “If you don’t believe selling is the most important thing, maybe you shouldn’t be here. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing…”
Fair enough. He had me there. True, I did not believe in what I was doing. Chalk one up for Lou.
I said, “What’s the matter, Lou? You seem down in the dumps.”
It wasn’t like Lou to come at me so directly, saying, in effect, if I didn’t like it here I shouldn’t be here, and frankly I was hurt and insulted. We were pals. But of course we weren’t pals. We were pals so long as he needed me and I needed him. He needed me for leads and I needed him for…who knew? What was he to me except a salesman, a pretty mediocre salesman at that, and not the most pleasant individual, prone to outbursts of temper, against others, at real or imagined slights, understandable, to be sure, for his age and in his condition, and maybe that was it, I was scoring points being nice to a man nobody else had patience for, I was being GOOD. For all I knew, I didn’t even like him – and he didn’t like me. But we’d never find out because we were kind of thrown in together. The more pathetic he became, the more I stuck by him. Maybe, lacking any real purpose here, I had made Lou my purpose. Maybe. Or maybe I was performing, world’s greatest actor that I was, using the boiler room as a stage, expecting applause.
If it can’t be Broadway or Hollywood, it’ll have to be the boiler room. Let it be the boiler room.
Anyway, it wasn’t like him to attack me.
Once in a while he’d say I was a fish out of water.
But that was the extent of his nastiness.
“I’m not in a bad mood,” he said.
But Lou, it turned out, was not only in a bad mood. He was in bad trouble. Someone had contacted him about that list of QUALITY customers he had purloined, and wanted it back, of course – pronto. Lou had refused. But whoever had called him had threatened him. Threatened to do harm if he didn’t return that list. Lou, circling his wagons, had threatened to make Xerox copies of that list, said he would distribute these duplicates to every salesman in town, rendering the list useless, turning, therefore, gold into dust.
“Are you crazy?”
“I’ve already started going out on calls,” he said, chuckling, and I should have gathered as much from that new bow tie he was sporting, not to mention that carnation in his lapel, and his sweet-smelling breath all of a sudden and the cologne which announced him a mile off, all signs of a salesman back in action!
“From that list?” I asked.
He was beaming. “Made a six thousand dollar sale yesterday.”
That was six times more than he had ever made from the best of my leads.
“Didn’t Fat Jack wonder where you got the lead?”
Lou said nothing for a while and I couldn’t imagine what he was holding back.
“I told him you gave it to me.”
Calmly, I told Lou never to do that again.
“I was only making you look good.”
“Don’t make me look good, Lou.”
“I thought I was doing you a favor.”
“Don’t do me favors. Not these. What’s gotten into you?”
“Survival.”
“That’s no answer.”
“How about SALES? That’s the answer. Fat Jack keeps saying it and you keep not believing it but that’s why we’re here, Eli! We’re here to sell. In case you didn’t know it, I’m a salesman. Selling is what I do. I don’t sell, I don’t exist.”
“You can’t be that desperate.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Lou – they’re going to come after you.”
“Who?”
“The boys who called you, Lou, and who were they, by the way?”
“It was just one guy.”
“Who?”
“Some guy.”
He wouldn’t tell.
What I couldn’t tell him was that if he kept going out on wall-to-wall jobs, that by itself would finish him. I’d been out with bigger, stronger and healthier guys and watched them huffing and puffing and nearly collapsing from the rigors of measuring – whereas Lou was extended to the max simply to negotiate his way across the showroom.
“I appreciate your concern,” Lou said.
“I thought I knew you, Lou.”
“People are full of surprises,” he said.
Mona didn’t know what was going on, of course, so as Lou got up to leave, she said: “I think I have a lead for you, Lou. I can’t verify till next week, when her husband comes back from…”
“That’s okay, Mona. Take your time. I’m in no hurry.”
After he left, Mona said, “Was that Lou talking, or was it my imagination?”
“He’s not hungry anymore, Mona. At least not for our leads.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t want to know.”
* * *
Sonja the Psychic said, “So that was Stephanie.”
She was being sugary, for starters.
“Yes it was,” I said.
“I know I promised to be good, but mind if I say something?”
“I hope it’s nice.”
“Yes it is. You’re too good for her. She doesn’t appreciate you.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“You deserve better.”
“Thanks.”
“She thinks she’s hot stuff.”
“That’s enough, Sonja.”
“Don’t you know what she’s really like?”
“Yes I do.”
“Men are so blind. What will it take to open your eyes?”