How to Sell: A Novel

by Clancy Martin

  “What the hell just happened out there?” he said.

  “She changed her mind. She said she was going to think about it.”

  “You little—” For half a beat he couldn’t say it. Then he did. “You little motherfucker.” He was so angry his eyes were wet. His cheeks were white and his chin and his ears turned red. But the terrible thing was the look on his face. I had never seen him wearing an expression anything like the expression he had on. “I heard the whole thing. This is my job, too, goddammit,” he said. “You are fucking with two jobs here, Bobby. Do you get that? Do you fucking understand that?”

  Later that afternoon he caught me in the box room. I was making it very tidy.

  “Dad’s in the hospital,” he said. “His roommate called the ambulance. Apparently he was naked in the front yard, pissing on the neighbor’s Mercedes.”

  We both had seen him like that before.

  “Where? In Palm Beach?”

  “Scottsdale. He’s back in Arizona, apparently. Just fucking typical.”

  Growing up Jim had lived with our father and his craziness for years. He blamed our father for his physical and mental diseases, in fact. But for me it felt like God was attacking all three of us.

  “He acts like he’s some kind of saint. He thinks he can do whatever he wants. So now we have to interrupt our lives. He’s not thinking about us when he does things like this.”

  “It’s not like he wants to be in the hospital,” I said.

  “Oh, you don’t think so? Don’t be so sure, Bobby. He treats hospitals like they’re goddamn luxury hotels. You know how he does it. He checks in every chance he gets. Welcome to the James Clark Resort and Spa. Clean sheets, fresh drugs, sleep till noon, free food, nurses who love all of your stories. Lay in bed and watch television all goddamn day. Between naps. I am seriously sick of this shit, Bobby. I love Dad. But this is about it for me.”

  We couldn’t leave on Friday, so we flew out the following night after closing and had Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday morning off of work. We would go straight from the airport to the store when we returned. In first class we got drunk on free brandy-and-sodas and Jim gave me some Ecstasy.

  “It’s not a drug,” he said. “It’s like an herb. But wait until you try it. Doctors use it for therapy. But you buy it at a head shop. Lisa found it. Her friends are all taking it now. She has been taking it before she comes to work in the morning. She says it helps her sell.”

  I did not tell him that Lisa and I had been taking it together. But she would only give me a half at a time because she was worried that otherwise people would notice.

  Jim and I swallowed two each. Then after an hour or so, as we were getting ready to land, he said, “This is fun. Let’s take another.” When we got off the plane we were in very good moods. We took a taxi to a topless bar. “We want some girls,” Jim told the taxi driver. He was a Mexican fellow and he shook his head at us. There was a crucifix hanging from his rearview mirror. But then he smiled. “Maybe there is a place,” he said. “But it is a long drive. It will cost you maybe one hundred dollars. Each way. But I can wait for you. I wait in the car.”

  We stopped for a six-pack of beer and took some more of the pills. We had our arms around each other and explained how we felt about our childhood. Jim was embarrassed. He checked on the driver by looking in the mirror. But the radio was playing tinny Mexican music.

  “It’s the drugs talking, Bobby,” he said. “It’s okay. I know.”

  “No, no, this is how I always felt,” I said. “I was just afraid to say it.”

  When he woke me we were at a warehouse in the desert. There were pickup trucks and old cars parked around it. It was dark except for one shy spotlight and the illuminated sign above the front door: CHILLI WILLI’S. Later I learned that this was not the original Chilli Willi’s. The real Chilli Willi’s is not in the United States at all but twenty miles back in the scrub south of the slums around the city—not the resort—of Cancún, Mexico.

  “Is he all right?” a bouncer asked my brother. I had my arms around his neck and shoulders like a little kid.

  “He will be fine,” he said. “He’s had a nap. I’ll sit him down. He doesn’t want anything more to drink.”

  Inside it was dark and there were rows of seats like in a theater, but in front of the seats were long tables, like the tables in a school cafeteria, so you had a place to put your drink. There were no waitresses; you went to one of the bars or a dancer brought you your drinks.

  Jim brought us two beers. “Take it easy,” he said. “You should do one more X,” he said, and gave me another pill. “It will sober you up. Chew it up. It will go into your bloodstream faster.”

  There was competition, so Jim gave a bouncer, a big Mexican with a beard, two hundred dollars and then we had a girl immediately. This was the girl Jim wanted, a Mexican, short, like our mother, but athletic, and with big breasts. She was about my age but had a square chin that made her look older. She grabbed my leg.

  “So it will be two? Two of you? Sounds like fun to me, man,” she said. “Three together is what I like. That works good for me, man. Is he okay?”

  “He’s good,” my brother said. “He’s just had a little too much to drink.”

  “Here,” he said, and took out his little brown bottle. “This will help him. Come on, Bobby, this will perk you up.” He started to tap out a line of cocaine on the table.

  “No, man, you can’t do that in here,” she said. “Let’s go up to the room. We can have all the fun you want up in the room, man. Put that away. Let’s go.”

  “Hang on. We need a girl for my brother.”

  “Okay, two girls, no problem, man. I got a friend. I get my good friend. He is going to like her. You going to like her,” she said, and put her hand between my legs.

  •

  Upstairs, the cocaine revived me. We laughed and cut long lines for the women on the wooden coffee table and fed them the rest of the Ecstasy.

  “Don’t worry,” Jim said. “I’ll have Lisa FedEx some more out tomorrow.” But he was only reassuring himself.

  There was beer brought to the room and then the woman with me, the friend, took me to a different room. She was not attractive but she was kind and interesting, what I could understand of her words. She explained her family, who were not in Arizona. There were no children, only nieces and nephews and her mother. Her father was dead. She did not speak much English. I took out my wallet and showed her my green card. She did not have one yet, of course.

  Ours was a small dark room. I wanted to talk more than I wanted to have sex. She was on top and eventually we both agreed that that would not work. She got on her hands and knees and I struggled from the back. We needed to do what we came to do so that we could sleep with good consciences. We were determined, fit, young, and in time we succeeded.

  In the morning the taxi driver was waiting according to his promise. We drove slowly down the desert road. There were rocks in the road, the sky was yellow, and long Sonora cacti inspected us from above. Those are the cacti like in the Road Runner cartoons, the ones with round arms reaching up. Twice I had to tap the driver’s shoulder to pull over so I could vomit. Jim slept heavily.

  At my father’s apartment his roommate or girlfriend told us we could not stay.

  “I can’t have you sleeping around here,” she said. “You are grown men. It doesn’t look right.” She had red hair and was wearing a bikini. I tried not to look at her too closely. Jim was eyeballing her breasts. He did that entirely innocently. If you told him later he was staring he would not even believe you.

  “I am going out to the pool now,” she said. “I have to lock up.”

  “Give us a minute,” Jim said. “I want to bring him a couple of things. Bobby, find his binders. Look on the bookshelves. I’ll get his shaving kit and some clothes.”

  “I’ll get him a couple of books, too,” I said. The woman sat on the sofa. “Maybe he would like a couple of his medals for next to his bed?”r />
  “This better not take long,” she said. “Is your dad all right? I hope he’s okay and everything. But seriously.”

  My father always kept a special room, his study, for his framed press clippings, ribbons, and medals. When we were little, bored at home alone while he was at work, we would look through them, Jim and I, especially the ones he hadn’t hung yet, in their frames on the floor. Mostly they were press clippings. “Local Boy Breaks Ski-Jumping Record.” “Jimmy Clark Wins Hill Climb.” “Freshman Scores Record Six Touchdowns.” “Boy Wonder Takes Gold in Wrestling, Shot Put and Diving.” He had won every athletic contest you can imagine. He played goalie for Canada in the Olympic Games. He still held the Shattuck Military Academy record for the hundred-yard dash. In early adulthood the success continued for several years. I remember one of the big ones, the color cover of Maclean’s magazine. He and my uncle Robert—whom I was named after—were both on their motorcycles, and the headline read “The New Millionaires.” That was when they were doing real estate development together in Calgary. When I was three and four—which would make Jim ten or eleven—he would drive us around town and show us the cedar-shake apartment buildings they built. He loved those false-mansard cedar-shake roofs. Even today in rundown parts of Calgary you can identify his apartment buildings by those roofs. “That’s quality, boys,” he would say. “If you always build quality you will never lose money.”

  I picked a few books from the shelves, Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, two of the orange-covered Sai Baba readers he loved, and a kind of photocopied manual or training book from the Rosicrucians, and off a little Chippendale lyre table that I recognized—he liked to tote it around with him; it was small enough to fit in the back of the car, and it was from my grandparents’ house back in Winnipeg—I took the invitation to the wedding of the Prince of Monaco in its green fake malachite frame. Then I asked his girlfriend where the bedroom was.

  “Your brother is already back there,” she said. “Why do you want to know? Go ahead. It’s not like you’re rummaging through my bedroom. I hope your dad gets better and everything but tell him I said he needs to find a new place to live. Peeing all over the neighbor’s yard. Peeing all over the kitchen. The stuff I had to throw out.”

  I found his sandalwood meditation beads next to the bed where he always kept them, and his reading glasses and his extra pair of regular glasses. I took some incense, too, some of the special sticks I was never allowed to burn that he kept in a carved box from Tibet. This was all part of the regular routine. I looked in the closet for a cardboard box and put everything in there. He moved so often I even knew where he kept his packing boxes. One stack beneath the bed and another stack in the closet underneath his shoe boxes.

  “Where are his keys?” Jim said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I should give you those. I need his car. That is my only car.”

  “Listen carefully to me. Our father is in the hospital. We came from Texas. We do not have a car. I will make this easy for you. I will not say it again. Give me his keys.”

  It was the only time I ever heard him speak like our mother.

  She went and brought the keys.

  Then the car wouldn’t start—“It’s out of gas,” Jim said—and we had to call the cabdriver back.

  At the hospital our dad was asleep. The skin of his face was as orange as earwax. But his arms on the blue blanket were white and thin. I looked away from him.

  “Shouldn’t we wake him?”

  “No, let him sleep,” Jim said. He took his wallet from a drawer next to the bed. “Let’s write him a note, though. Put his medals on that chair so he can reach them. He’ll want to look at those.”

  I put his sandalwood beads by his water glass so he would discover them first. Then we put the note under the beads.

  Outside, our cabdriver was taking a nap. He had his hat pulled over his face. I admired the fact that he could sleep like that. I knew I would never be the kind of man who could sleep on the bench of his cab with his hat down low over his eyes.

  Jim patted him gently on the shoulder.

  “Take us up Camelback Road,” he said. “You know the Phoenician Hotel? That’s where we want to go. It’s right at the base of Camelback Mountain. Not Superstition. Camelback.”

  I hoped we wouldn’t be driving through any mountains. My stomach was still bouncing around.

  “I always wanted to stay at this resort,” Jim said. “When I was in high school my buddies and me used to sneak into their swimming pool. We would listen until some guy ordered a drink and put it on his room. Then once he left we would use his room number. It worked every time. They never caught us. We came back over and over again.”

  I watched the desert and the condo developments out the window. I was looking for a miniature golf course that I had loved when I was a kid.

  “Putting us up at the Phoenician is the least Dad can do. Don’t worry. I’ll tell him it was my idea. But we won’t mention it until we’re leaving.”

  I remember how for a moment I understood my affection for him differently, then. I thought of how women will have sex with a man simply out of admiring and liking him so much. Not because they are attracted in a physical way. As a brother you could understand that.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And what’s the only rule?” He rubbed his nose with his finger. He looked suddenly very happy. We both needed some sun. “There are no stinking rules!” he said.

  Under different circumstances our father would have approved this attitude. It may well have been an expression of his. Jim often repeated Dad’s expressions, likely without understanding he was doing so. I did not remember that particular slogan. But it was a good one.

  •

  When we left Dad was still in the hospital.

  “I think they are going to amputate my feet, boys,” he told us. “It’s my diabetic neuropathy.”

  Jim looked at me, so that Dad couldn’t see his expression, and rolled his eyes. He had been talking to the doctor, who explained that our dad’s problems were “largely psychiatric.”

  “Maybe you can come out to Texas for Christmas, Dad,” I said. “Or for New Year’s Eve.”

  “I doubt it, son,” he said. “I expect I’ll still be right here in this goddamn hospital bed.”

  It was mostly the ugly and the overweight who worked the phones, and two of Sheila’s cousins, twins, who were both in wheelchairs and could not navigate the showcases.

  “Some of them used to be on the floor,” Jim told me. “Rachel, for example. Then her husband went into the catering business and she put on all that weight. I should have paid to send her to Weight Watchers. She sells three times back here what she ever sold on the floor. That’s why I’m sitting you across from her. When you’re selling, sell with one ear on Rachel. Take in every word she says. Especially if she’s selling a silver contract.”

  I faced Rachel and I was close enough to her that if she was eating a donut the particles from her mouth almost reached me. That was helpful because it kept my nose down on the phone. I could not watch her chew on her food.

  My phone was plastic and red. On my phone I had eight regular lines and ten Rolex lines. The Rolex lines were not sales lines. They were problem lines. These were paid orders we had already taken but the watch was nowhere to be found. The bottom line was the line to Mr. Popper’s office. You never used that line.

  “We may as well get some blood on your hands, Bobby. Most of these guys are so mad you probably can’t make them any madder. Well, that’s not true. They can always get madder. Your leverage is the fact that they have paid. They have paid and they are not getting their money back. So use the watch. The watch they don’t have yet and are begging for.”

  I nodded. I looked at the phone as though it were a live animal. A biter.

  “Did you do what I told you? Did you watch the news this morning?”

  “I said I watched it.”

  “Okay, fine, you said that. Now take a call. Think
about what you are going to say. What was on the news? You need something big.”

  “There was a fire in Chicago. In a nightclub. A bunch of people died.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Bobby. Don’t pretend to be stupid. I know you are not stupid. You can’t use a fire in Chicago, Bobby! Come on! Think! We need weather. Was there a tornado? A hurricane? You need international weather. You need—Oh, hell, it doesn’t matter. Just grab a call. Do your best.”

  The Rolex lines were all blinking red. It was five after eight and already all ten Rolex lines were waiting, on hold. There was a special option on the voice mail you could select if you wanted to check on your Rolex. “Push 7 if you are inquiring about the status of your Rolex order.” You could leave a message, too, but no one ever checked the message. I tried not to look at Jim, picked up the phone, and pushed a button.

  “Fort Worth Deluxe. Thank you for holding. Mr. Myers? Nice to speak with you, Mr. Myers. Yes sir. I understand, sir, I am sorry about that, sir. Yes, I have your information right here, Mr. Myers. Bobby Clark. That’s right, that’s my name, sir. No sir, Jim is not in the office at the moment. I am his brother, though, and I am fully familiar with your order. Yes, that’s right, I have it right here on my computer”—I opened the large filing cabinet next to Jim’s desk and started to look for the Matthew Myers file, then Jim pulled it out for me—“a ladies’ stainless and gold with a mother-of-pearl diamond dial. That’s a beautiful watch, sir, my own wife wears one. The good news is it’s here. No, not here in the store, not quite, but here in the country. The factory in Switzerland, that’s right, sir, that’s where the watch is coming from. But there’s been a holdup in Chicago. The flight from Zürich connects in Chicago, that’s right, sir, and that’s where our customs agents are. That means we’ve almost got our hands on the watch. Yes, we very much appreciate your patience, Mr. Myers. The holdup is this fire they had there last night. The problem is our broker. His name?”