How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  Those words made me anxious, because Lisa had used the same expression just the other day. She had said, “You and your brother are both just a couple of kids, Bobby.” I did not mind being called a kid, or even hearing Jim described as a kid. What I didn’t like was Dad repeating Lisa’s words.

  Two days later, in a Denny’s on the west side of downtown, the icy morning he left, my father changed. I think this was the first time I met the man who would become my new father. He was angry with me because I was not responding to remarks of Priscilla’s. I had known Priscilla for years. She was not a normal imaginary friend. She was an important resident of a foreign planet. The planet existed in a parallel universe. When he first told me about her, when I was seven years old, he said he had met her “just through dumb luck” on an astral trip during his initiation as an Eckankar trainer. I suppose she was in the audience. My father consulted Priscilla on personal and sexual concerns of his clients and parishioners. He insisted he was a mystic, not a psychic, which meant that he never charged for his consultations with Priscilla. He did, however, charge for his counseling. He had a PhD in counseling from an outfit in southern California.

  Around the time I turned twelve Priscilla became a person whom my father could see and converse with, though she remained hidden to me because of my spiritual condition. But by now my father had abandoned this distinction and demanded that Priscilla be treated with ordinary social courtesy. So he was shouting at me in Denny’s because I was not answering Priscilla’s questions. This time I felt I had to admit to myself that my father was not merely playing at being a crazy person like he might otherwise have done, for the pity. Maybe he really was a schizophrenic, or worse, like our mother had insisted for years.

  Naturally I do not know what questions Priscilla was asking. They were probably simple questions about my mother, the store, my brother, my sex life, hopefully not Lisa, et cetera. I knew Priscilla had good manners and common sense. I pictured her in her forties, with graying blond hair and glasses. She might have worn a button-down sweater over a T-shirt, and come from a college town in British Columbia or Washington state.

  Maybe it is only his blood sugar, I thought. He had severe diabetes.

  The scene ended when my father threw his glass of iced coffee at me. Then he left without paying the check. The glass broke when it hit my head. I had milk and coffee on my face.

  The waitress came with a clean rag and some paper napkins. She mopped up the table.

  “Your eyebrow is bleeding,” she said. “He’s your dad?” she asked me. I nodded. I was grateful for some sympathy.

  “You should be respectful of your dad,” she said. “What did you say to him?” She shook her head.

  “It’s seventeen dollars,” she said. At Denny’s you pay at the register. I asked her to refill my Coke and for a second bacon scrambler. I knew he would drive around downtown for half an hour and then come back. It was his last day in Texas before getting back on the road. He would come back to say goodbye before he hit the highway. Plus I had left my wallet at the store and I didn’t have any money.

  “After you pay your check,” the waitress said.

  “Put it on this check,” I said. “I’m not finished.”

  “Oh, yes, you are,” she said.

  Years after, when Jim and I were partners in our own store, I might tell a version of this story to one or another customer I liked—they do exist—and the customer would say something along the lines of: “So that’s when you finally knew your dad was insane?” Then I felt an unfamiliar obligation to assert myself: not in defense of my father, and not for my own sake, either, but on account of the truth. I wanted to reply: What the hell makes you think he was crazy? Because you’ve never seen another world, you know it doesn’t exist? That’s called an argument from ignorance, and of all the twenty-two logical fallacies it’s the easiest to understand. Look, I don’t expect that when the curtain goes down, and I am alone in the hospital room, with the lights fading, and the world, the whole world, is vanishing into the dark, that, suddenly, like the best birthday surprise you ever got, the fluorescents will spark back on and everyone will shout, “Surprise!”—all the dead people I’ve ever lost and thought I’d left behind, there, ringing my bed, with gifts in their hands, or with their arms open to receive me—and I will rise from the white hospital sheets and they will give me my complimentary custom-made gold-vermeil-and-carved-ivory wings. With Jesus standing there in a silver diaper. But I do not know it cannot be true. And if in another life I meet my father and he is waiting with his I-told-you-so-son-but-you-never-listen smile, I might ask him questions, but I won’t be any more astonished than I was when, say, Wendy first kissed me and then let me take off her pants and fuck her.

  How are you so sure he was insane? I wanted to shout at my customer and seize him by the ears and neck, or by the hair on the back of his head, and shake his shitty face off. How the hell could you possibly know?

  Mike Bloom, formerly Ezekiel Blumenstein, known to me and Jim—and Lisa, too—as Granddad, taught me those logical fallacies, and many other tricks of both rationality and motivated irrationality. Years later he became like a mentor to me. There was a short list of us who could call Mr. Blumenstein Granddad and he called each of us Grandson. Granddaughter for Lisa, of course. He was the only person I ever met in the jewelry business who told me to ask myself about the karmic implications of my actions.

  The jewelry business is rich with optimistic people.

  Unlike my father, Granddad was cynical about human nature, but he had led the kind of complex life that stimulates the mind. He was, for example, the only real person I had ever heard of who lost his parents to pirates. His father had been a yacht builder, a speculator, who also owned a chain of used-car lots across Texas and Oklahoma. They had been in the Canary Islands and were boarded by African pirates, and they macheted his mother and father and dumped him, the two-and-a-half-year-old, on a beach on the coast of Spain. He remembered it all quite clearly. He was raised by Basques and spoke and read nine languages. He studied phenomenology with the students of Husserl, the big boys, at Leuven. Then he moved back to Oklahoma, in honor of his father, and lived there for twenty years before taking an interest in Swiss watches and opening his present outfit in Dallas. Everyone said he had had a long, long-distance affair with Lana Turner. Because he supplied everyone, he was the best gossip in the Dallas–Fort Worth jewelry business. “I should have been a barber, Grandson,” he would tell me. “Or a fry cook. That’s an honest living. Back in the old days a barber always heard the news first. A man makes friends on that kind of information. Money, too.”

  Behind his desk he kept an old Russian machine gun on a shelf. It was not because he was Russian mob. He hated the Russian advance into our market and prominently and dangerously refused to do business with them. It was the machine gun he had used when he was a teenager and fought with the Basques in Spain. If he liked you, Granddad might tell the story of the gun.

  “This gun has lived up more excitement than either of us, Grandson,” he told me. “It’s one of the guns the Russians brought in before Franco, when Spain was supposed to become the Communist South beach club of Europe. The regular fucking Costa del Pinko.”

  He leaned back in his chair and patted the gun with his large hand in a familiar, almost sexual way.

  “I got it from a woman, a Gypsy woman. You should have seen this old woman. Uglier than the south end of a northbound dump truck. She had it from her lover, a man who died on a hill in Spain during the resistance. They bombed him and his whole band—they were all guerilla fighters, those boys, commies but tough as blood—working behind the lines. She climbed the hill afterward to find his body but all she found was this weapon. She lost it to me in a bet. If I lost I would have had to fuck her. Can you believe that? Crazy Gypsy woman. I fucked her anyway, of course. She was a good old gal. I couldn’t have been eighteen at the time and she was seventy going on a hundred and twenty-five. She liked it slow. O
f course, you don’t want to hear this shit. Let’s get down to business. Very nimble in bed, though, the Gypsy race. They take it seriously. Many of them are bullfighters and flamenco dancers. The flamenco dancers, those are the cowardly ones. Can’t say I blame them, though. You probably never killed a bull.” I shook my head. “It ain’t very much fun.”

  Granddad was a still, restful man, like you imagine an ancient Chinese emperor might be, but his hands were always moving. He shuffled the watches around his desk while he talked, writing up my memorandum invoice as he proceeded. I had the job of wrapping each watch carefully in tissue paper before placing it in my briefcase. The boxes and papers, when he had them, went in a separate cardboard box. Granddad never dealt in any counterfeit boxes or papers. Everything was original. The watches, too, naturally.

  He preferred to sell men’s watches.

  “For a woman a watch is just another piece of jewelry, Grandson,” he told me. “There’s a reason the best watches are made for men. Women don’t understand the aesthetic.”

  There were Patek Philippes on their straps, the finest watches in the world, repeaters that chimed the hour and quarter hour, moon face complications and platinum heads; there were the stainless steel Blancpains and IWCs, watches that the men in the industry all wore, because they were much more expensive than they looked; there were the old reliable sure-to-sell Rolexes, the bread and butter, which bored even me already; there were Breguets, with mysterious complications, modeled after the pocket watch Breguet himself had made for Marie Antionette and delivered long after she was dead; there were glamorous and fantastically expensive Ulysse Nardins, Vacheron Constantins, and Franck Mullers, the ones you sold only to Arabs, wealthy gay men, and the true connoisseurs, several of them with crystal backs so you could view the elaborate multicolored movements, and the tiny sapphires and rubies within the gears that helped them revolve; there were the square-headed Boucherons, mostly yellow gold and on gold mesh bracelets, that Granddad told me the French preferred; there were the coin-headed Corums, which my father always complimented when he noticed them on other men’s wrists, and which I had planned to buy for him one day, and never did. My dad wore his own watch with the head against the underside of the wrist, so you had to roll your arm over to see the time. “The only way a gentleman wears his watch, son,” he told me. “Because a gentleman is never in a hurry, and he does not need to know the time except when he desires to.” Granddad wore his stainless steel Patek the same way.

  “Time, Grandson,” he explained to me one slow afternoon, when he insisted I wait for a shipment of sixty back-of-list Bulgaris on crocodile straps that Mr. Popper was running in a Saturday sale. “That’s why I love them the way I do. A watch puts you in the middle of the stuff of ordinary being. That’s what I like about them. They remind us of our position in the universe. Stranded in the goddamn seconds the way we are. But between our rounds here—in life, I mean—we get a taste of the other stuff. That’s why the Chinese call this the middle kingdom.”

  I loved to sit and listen to him when he spoke in this way.

  “Well, enough of this metaphysical bullshit,” he said, after the UPS man dropped off the watches. “Let’s send you back to the real world of buying and selling. Finish your sandwich, there, and get on I-35.”

  He often waited for me and then we ate lunch together. He loved Reuben sandwiches. But he rarely ate more than a couple of bites.

  “I bet ole Ronnie will make a killing on these Bulgaris,” he said. “Don’t think much of them myself. But it’s a good price point on a watch. People know the name.”

  I watched him take one of the colorful Bulgaris out of its box, place it on his wrist, set it, and then put it back in the box again.

  “You know the only thing I miss about retail, Grandson?” I did not believe he had ever been in retail. But since he said it, it reflected the facts. “Credit cards. I miss sliding those credit cards. A dollar has romance, no doubt about it. But a credit card can fuck.”

  I’m not hungry,” Lisa said. “Anyway I’m broke. Let’s go down to the Caves.”

  “I can buy you lunch,” I said.

  “I know where you get your lunch money,” she said. She meant from the cash box on the floor that we used to make change for our cash sales. But now I was pretty sure she stole from it, too. Everybody did.

  “I have real money, too.” We had been paid last Friday. It was funny that she was already out of cash. “But we don’t have to eat if you don’t want to.”

  At lunch Lisa and I often snuck down into the old box room, what was called the Caves, which was behind the rows of jewelers’ benches with the dirty, silent men in safety goggles and grimy aprons bent over their clamps and tweezers, with blue torches lined up one after another in their wire torch rests, hissing, barely audible, back to the very end of the basement where there were rows and rows of cardboard boxes holding thousands of silk pouches, seed pearl necklaces and earrings and rings—things Mr. Popper had bought from China for a hundred dollars a crate—and the counterfeit Rolex papers, and the counterfeit “Rottexx” watches we sold for fifty bucks a pop, and knockoff Mexican Swatches that looked exactly like the real thing (even the Swatch rep couldn’t tell the difference), and the hundreds and hundreds of empty jewelry boxes, in our signature forest green with red interiors, Christmas colors we kept all year round, waiting to be filled and sold, waiting to be unwrapped, admired, opened, and discarded.

  We had sex with her sitting on a piece of dusty metal shelving and her legs around my waist. “Isn’t that cold on your bottom?” I said, and she said, “It’s called my ass, Bobby. Shut up and fuck me. I like it on my ass. It hurts. It feels good. Come on. Make me remember it. Really fuck me!”

  Afterward I didn’t want to go back upstairs and face those swarming, oily customers, but then, smoking the crank, I felt like cleaning something. “I love to do it down here,” Lisa said, and the way she said it made me think she had done it with more than only me down here, so I changed the subject. We smoked the crystal off a square of tinfoil. I wanted to get on the floor and empty some ashtrays. Plus I was getting paranoid. Jim was surely looking for us.

  “Let’s finish this last and go back upstairs,” I said. I knew if I told her I was worried about Jim she would make fun of me and become stubborn.

  “Don’t worry about Jim,” she said. “He’s busy, too. He’s not always looking for us, believe me. He’s got more than enough to take care of right now. Plenty. Don’t be silly. Anyway, you shouldn’t exaggerate your own importance. It’s not attractive.”

  She tapped out a little more powder onto the tinfoil and lit the lighter again. I could see how hot it was getting and worried about her fingertips burning. But she did not seem to notice. I wanted a glass of water.

  “I wish we had more time like this,” I said. “Just the two of us. It seems like I never get to see you. Not enough, I mean.”

  “Bobby.” She laughed. “You are sweet. Don’t be crazy. We spend about twenty hours a day together.”

  “I tried to call you from Dallas last night when I was on my runs.” I had called from the phone in Kizakov’s office. “I thought maybe if I got back early, if I hurried, we could have a late dinner. You weren’t around.” Jim had been out, too. More and more I had been noticing that about the two of them. How they went missing at the same time. I couldn’t ask Jim where he was, of course.

  She ignored me. She was focused on cooking the drug.

  “Jim is a schemer. I don’t mean that as a criticism. It’s because he’s an entrepreneur. He’s always busy cooking up something for Jim. That’s what keeps him out of trouble. Kind of.” She laughed. “His plans. If he doesn’t include you in all of them it’s for your own good. Trust me on that one. I’m older than you are.”

  “It’s not that,” I said. “It’s not like I’m trying to impress him. I just want to do a good job. I want to be a good employee.”

  “He’s already proud of you, Bobby. You don’t have to pr
ove anything to him. He loves you because you’re his brother. Because you are the person you are. Not because of anything you’re doing.”

  That reminded me of something my mother once told me. It was after an award ceremony for the safety patrols in elementary school. I had cheated on the national exam and won “The Smartest Safety Patrol in Canada” or some such crazy Canadian award. After I received my new ten-speed bike and carried the flag down the Seventh Street Mall, my mother took me aside and said, “You see that? That’s what success does, Bobby. No one is going to like us for who we are. You have to make people like you. They will never like you just you on your own.”

  That was not what my father would have said. He thought human beings loved one another, truly, all the way down.

  Black Friday had come and gone and I was still not on the sales floor.

  “That was the promise,” I told Jim. “I am back-of-the-house and the buys until after Thanksgiving and then I go on the floor.”

  “It’s true, Jim,” Lisa said. It was after hours, almost midnight, and the three of us were sitting at his desk sorting diamond melee. The Watchman was still there, too, a few desks away, checking in diamond bezels, counterfeit buckles, and other Rolex accessories that we had shipped in from all over the world.

  “It’s Sheila who is holding you up,” Jim said. “You know how it works, Bobby. Sheila’s in charge of all the employees. In the end it’s her call.”

  “She shouldn’t lie. She shouldn’t break her promises,” I said.

  “I don’t think it’s Sheila at all. I think it’s Dennis,” Lisa said. “It’s because you are Jim’s little brother.”

  “Whatever,” Jim said. “Who knows? It doesn’t matter. It’s politics. Dennis wants my job. He’s sick of running the back. We’ll get you on the phones and then he won’t be able to keep you off the floor. Sell some silver contracts. That’s how the Polack got everyone paying attention. Other than her tits, I mean.”