Bookman

by Ed Baldwin

  “Look, Phil, you’re DM today because you can get book orders. If you can motivate other men to do the same thing you can be president of this or almost any other company. The bottom line is sales. It’s not how much you know about economics or administration. We can hire guys off the street with a master’s degree in business administration for less money than we paid you last week. What counts is who can move the product. Understand?”

  I nodded, not trusting my voice to say anything. Sitting here on the side street in a little town in Arkansas with the vice-president of a large international company who had just told me that I had something, worth big money, in spite of barely a high school education, was too damn much to handle all at once.

  We picked up Barney and swung by Parkin to pick up Billy. He had his usual order.

  “They’re gonna elect you Mayor of Parkin,” I said, proud of my man. “What is this, five in a row?”

  “We must speak the same language,” Billy said with a rare smile. “But it’s seven in a row.”

  “Seven?” Burt said. “Well now, this does call for a beer.

  As we all sat around a back table in a favorite spot in Parkin called The Wet Willie, Burt entertained us with book stories of the old days and what it was like to sell books in Minneapolis in the winter. Barney even chimed in with some tales I hadn’t heard yet. He’d gotten an order, too. I was the only one who blanked.

  The next day Burt taught me his hiring interview. It didn’t have the flash that Barney’s had, but was more factual and would appeal to the college crowd. He warned me what to say and what not to say about the conversion of a salesman from salary to commission. The company, he said, got a lot more flack from dissatisfied salesmen than from customers. I realized that in the last five months I had been in contact with more prospective salesmen who had been through part or all of the training program than I had placed libraries.

  Burt was gone five days later, leaving me with a full set of sample newspaper ads, one for any situation, copies of all the interviews that I would need, and an assurance from him that he would be back in a few weeks. We’d even driven over to Little Rock and checked on the condition of the furniture in storage there for three years in case we should want to open the office any time soon. That was a particularly good idea because Billy was frothing at the mouth with ambition.

  We had one new man that Burt hired who seemed pretty sharp and wrote an order his first night out. Gerald Hamilton was back at it in earnest, too, after spending his summer earnings. Already my district was doubling Lanny’s production of a year ago. I decided on a road trip to Jackson, Tennessee. With 35,000 souls it was big enough to support a sales office some day. I phoned ahead and put an ad in the paper, leaving a box number with the paper for the replies.

  When we arrived there were several responses already. We checked into the Downtowner, a higher class place than we usually used, so I could give hiring interviews the next day in relative style.

  “Okay, boys. Let’s hit the streets!” I said, trying to muster some enthusiasm that even I didn’t have.

  Barney looked at the sky that was growing pretty black. “There’s a thunderstorm about to hit,” he said, just as a clap of thunder boomed and a few raindrops started to fall.

  “Fine, we’ll take a vote. Everyone who wants to try and get in a few hours, raise their hand.”

  Nobody, not even Billy made a move, so we went to a bar across the street to wait it out. By closing time we were all getting in the mood for some serious partying so we bought a case of beer and walked across the street in what was now a downpour.

  Between rebel yells and complaints about the lack of pussy in this small town we were quite a sight running into the lobby carrying our case of beer and soaked to the gills. Not wanting to be impolite, we asked the desk clerk to join us.

  “Got my own!” he said, coming around the counter and unlocking the coke machine to reveal 2 six-packs of Bud. He popped the top on one and took the rest of the beer into his office. “Common back here, boys. I got some sofas that are pretty comfy.”

  We followed the man behind the counter into the manager’s office.

  “John Sevier,” he said as he shook our hands. He was taller than any of us with an ivy league cut to his clothes but a heavy Southern accent.

  “Phil Lazar. This is Barney Baker, Billy Schatz, and that’s Lucian Fowler over there in the John.”

  “What are y’all up to?”

  “We’re with Collier’s, in town to hire some trainees and champion the cause of literacy,” I said, borrowing a favorite phrase of Gerald’s.

  “Shit, that sounds good,” he said, draining his first one and opening the second with the same motion.

  Lucian came back from the men’s room, weaving across the lobby wrestling with his zipper. He was properly introduced, slouched down on a chair by the desk and went to sleep. He showed promise in the order writing department but needed practice in the late hours and socializing.

  By 3:00 a.m. the beer was running short, and John was teaching the rest of us a drinking song he had learned at college. He’d been a student at some big Eastern school, a page in the Senate, a diplomatic mail carrier, a trainee in the Hilton Hotel management school, and was now the night clerk at the Downtowner Motor Inn. He wasn’t 21 yet and seemed to have already had a full life. But it lacked one thing—he hadn’t yet sold door to door. He readily accepted a job offer and typed out his resignation while he started in on our beer supply, having finished his own.

  The next day dawned clear and crisp and all too soon. I left the sleeping revelers and contacted the people who had responded to the ad. One guy, I hired in the coffee shop. The others weren’t interested in moving to Memphis, but I kept their names just in case we should open a branch office. The territory ended up being pretty good and when the guys regained consciousness we did well.

  Now that we had six guys the office looked a little busier. I hired Honey to come down in her lowest neckline blouse and sit at the reception desk. I made the guys get some decent clothes now that they could all afford them, and they took turns hanging around the office trying to look half busy and joking with Honey. She loved it, of course.

  Her job was to answer the phone and greet the new applicants. She also checked over the applications, which were very detailed, to make sure they had filled the form out completely. You could get into medical school and give less information than Collier’s asked for to sell books.

  The whole time the applicants were filling this form out the two or three salesmen who were selected to come in early that day were walking in and out of the reception area bantering good naturedly with Honey and each other.

  When the phone rang Honey would say, “It’s for you, Mr. Sevier,” or whoever was around. If John was there, he’d rush into the training room and take the call after closing the door, importantly. He did embellish a bit much on occasion.

  “Get John Bell on the line in New York,” he said to Honey one day when we had a particularly sharp prospect in the office.

  Honey looked a little surprised but began dialing and going through various operators and secretaries, all with the button on the cradle secretly depressed. After a decent interval she called out, “Mr. Sevier, Mr. Bell in New York is on the line.”

  “Mr. Bell, John Sevier here in Memphis. It’s about that truckload of promotional literature we were supposed to have last week. It’s not here yet and the offices in Little Rock and Jackson, Mississippi are crying for it. I’ve got to fly to Little Rock this afternoon and brief our people over there on the new product and don’t even have a picture to show them!” John carried on loudly with the door open. The applicant didn’t miss a word.

  By the time they got into my office for the hiring interview they were impressed with the busy, businesslike atmosphere of the office, and of course Honey’s mammoth bosoms. The interview was a natural extension of the show in the outer office, and in two weeks time we were running two full crews. We still ha
d some attrition when they couldn’t get the hang of it and had to miss a pay day, or if they got picked up, but most of them wrote an order fairly soon after seeing me or Billy or Barney write one. By the time they figured out that the job wasn’t as glamorous as they thought they were making too much money to quit.

  With several new salesmen and the office on a high from the success of the first few weeks, I decided to swing down to Indianola, Mississippi and work some of the really small towns in the southern end of the district. They were too far to reach in a day’s drive from Memphis and I reasoned they would be bypassed for the larger Greenwood and Greenville on a road trip. I was right. Sunflower and Bolivar counties were untapped lodes of families with a thirst for knowledge and good credit. After three days and nights of the usual carousing, we were running low on cash and stamina and decided to hit a town closer to Memphis on Thursday and drive back into Memphis that night.

  “I thought this town was green,” John said as we cruised the town that had had such a mixed effect on the crew the last time we were there.

  I frowned at him for bringing up that particular subject with several new men in the car. “We’ve never had any trouble here since I’ve been with the company,” I said, not adding that we had worked only during the day on Saturdays.

  “What does green mean?” came the obvious question from the rear.

  “Green refers to the Green River Ordinance. Green River, Wyoming was the first town to enact a local ordinance against door to door solicitation. Every small town we work has one,” I said, parroting the exact explanation I had heard Lanny give countless times before. “But if we behave ourselves, very few of them are enforced. If we have any problem with the police I’ll handle it. They usually just ask you to quit working for the night. The law is unconstitutional anyway because it violates our right to work. We do handle a product that comes under Federal Interstate Commerce Regulations, but to get it off the books we have to sue each little town and it just isn’t worth it. The big towns like Memphis, of course, wouldn’t dare try anything like that so we never have any trouble there.” I had no idea what parts of Lanny’s explanation might be true. It satisfied the crew, though, and we proceeded to assign territory and go on our way.

  I hit a deal early on and the guy was so congenial that I stayed and talked until time to start picking people up. Randal McWillie, the newest man was where he was supposed to be, at a laundromat, still practicing his presentation. He had blanked but given three presentations—at least that’s what he said. This was his home town, and I was a little suspicious he might have spent the evening doing something besides working. John, Lucian, and George Poindexter were nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t unusual to have one late arrival, but three was kind of worrisome, especially in a town that was as “green” as this one was.

  After a couple rounds through their territories I found a phone booth. “Maybe someone got sick,” I said, getting out of the car. “I’ll check the hospital.” Of course, I called the police station.

  “I was supposed to meet an old friend here in town and I can’t find him,” I told the officer who answered the phone. “He’s from out of town and might have gotten lost. Have y’all heard anything from a John Sevier?” I asked, innocently. I didn’t want to give out any other names right at the first.

  “Yeah, we got Sevier here, also Fowler and Poindexter. You want to come on down to the station and see ’em?” was the reply. He graciously gave me directions to the jail.

  Like a stone perched on a stool behind the high desk, the officer followed me with his eyes from the parking lot, through the double glass doors and across the waiting room. His jaw was set and his lips were tight. He was about 250 pounds, gray and middle aged. A long drooping ash was clinging to the cigarette hanging from his lower lip.

  “Do you want to see your boys?” he asked with a hint of a smile, as he got up and snubbed out the cigarette. He was going to let me look at the merchandise before the bargaining began.

  “Hey Phil! Where ya been?” John cried out happily as soon as I came through the door. All three were in the same cell with their coats and briefcases. They began to gather their belongings in anticipation of release.

  The two holding cells were in front of a common room where a jailer sat watching an ancient television set. An iron door to the rear of the room led to what I assumed to be more permanent quarters.

  “We caught your boys here knockin’ on peoples’ doors after dark. You can’t do that in this town without a permit,” Stoneface said, turning to glare at me like I was dogshit.

  “Well, if…,” I started to say, seeing an opening.

  “And we don’t issue no permits.” He’d just been leading me along to crack his little joke.

  He and the jailer thought that was incredibly funny. The jailer, a short, thin man with a long nose and red neck, got up and laughed until the sergeant stopped abruptly to glare at me some more.

  “We were just in town to see a few clients who requested we stop by to give them an opportunity to see a revolutionary new reference library. That hardly sounds like grounds to throw a guy in jail.”

  “Patrolman Phillips watched the tall one there knock on 10 doors in a row before he picked him up. We been gettin’ calls all night about you people, and let me tell you we don’t like that!”

  I could see this wasn’t going to be easy. “Ok. How much to get them out?”

  “Seventy-five bucks a head,” he said, turning to stone again.

  I was aghast. That was more than I’d ever heard of asking for bail. Usually they looked to see how much you had and then made that bond. I had checked my cash supply on the way in and had $32. “That’s outrageous We’ll never be able to come up with that tonight.”

  He nodded his head with an earnest look on his face like we were having a discussion, and I had just made a valid point with which he agreed. Then he said, “breakfast is at 6:00.”

  John immediately began talking to the jailer who was packing his lunch box in preparation for going home while I walked out with the sergeant.

  “Listen, Sarge. You know those guys aren’t the type you really want to lock up… especially not for a few days.”

  The guy refused to budge, but somehow John managed to convince the jailer to take his check for $20 and his Gulf credit card over to the Holiday Inn to cash it and bring the money back. Together now, John and I had enough to get him out, leaving Lucian and George to sample breakfast.

  “Told you it was green,” John said, smiling in relief at not being inside any longer.

  We collected Randal and headed out of town only to discover we were almost out of gas. Luckily, a well-lit Rose Oil Company service station appeared in the distance. Prominently displayed over the pumps was a sign that said, “All local credit cards accepted.” We pulled in.

  “Fill ’er up,” I said as I got out to go to the restroom. The attendant shuffled over to the car and began cranking the pump to clear the meter when something made me ask him, “Say, which credit cards do you take?”

  “All locally acceptable cards,” he replied, stopping the process before any gas was pumped.

  “Phillips?” I asked, handing him the card with the lowest balance due.

  He took the card and looked on the back and handed it back. “Nope.”

  “Gulf?”

  He repeated the process, looking at the back, handing it over. “Nope.”

  “Texaco? Mobile? Shell?”

  The routine and the answer were the same after each.

  I was starting to get upset. “Well, what the hell do you mean by locally accepted credit cards?”

  “It means we don’t accept no credit card that don’t say Rose Oil Company on the back, right there.” He pointed to a spot on the back of John’s Mobile card that did not say Rose Oil Company. Then he directed us to an independent station down the road that might take a check. It was not as well lit as the Rose station, but they did sell gas and they were open. It was after midnight.<
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  An old man was dosing in the doorway, balanced on a wooden Coke case. When we pulled in the bell on the driveway alarm woke him with a start. He began to get up, but when I got out of the car he just sat there saving the effort in case I wanted to use the bathroom or buy a Coke. I walked over to him as if I hadn’t a care in the world and popped the question.

  “Say, ah, we’re running low on gas and need to get to Memphis tonight. Can you cash a check?”

  He took the check, still blank but with my name clearly printed on it, along with the name of the Memphis Bank. He looked at it carefully and frowned, rubbing his jaw. “I don’t know you,” he said, as a statement, then added quickly, “do I?’’ just in case he was supposed to.

  “No. I get through here every week or so. I usually cash checks down at the bank, but it’s closed. I always fill up here,” I lied.

  He didn’t seem to care where I had bought my gas in the past. He rubbed his grizzled beard and leaned back on the coke case. John took over before he could say no for sure.

  “Yeah, we were hopin’ to get back to Memphis tonight. I got me a girlee lined up down at the King Cotton Hotel I sure would hate to miss.” As he said this he shuffled toward the man and saw a bottle of whiskey, a half pint, behind the coke case. “Say. Could I have a swig of that?”

  There was already a smile on the old man’s face from the contemplation of the King Cotton Hotel and the delights therein when John pointed to the bottle. He turned to look at it like he was surprised to find it there. His gaze was slow, looking down over his faded coveralls and protuberant belly to the cement floor where the bottle was tucked in behind the Coke case. His gaze was equally slow coming back up to face John. He smiled and nodded.

  John sat down beside him and unscrewed the top off the bottle and took a healthy drink. He swallowed and then took a deep breath as the whiskey hit bottom.