I found a job with a pyramid scheme called SlashCo, selling cutlery sharp enough to slice through polycarbonate and copper. Not that it was a competitive hiring process; they simply hired whoever replied to the company’s help wanted advertisement. It wasn’t a bad job, per se. Their business model was centered upon recruitment. They made money by the number of recruits they could convince to hock their wares, not necessarily by the skillset of their sales team. There were some good salespeople, but mostly it was just kids who had $139 to put down as a deposit in order to sell some knives to their parents and aunts and uncles. The problem was, I’d just been released from five years in juvenile detention, knew nobody in the area, and was in witness protection.
But, to his credit, my manager helped me out. Named Pinkett, he was a heavyset, jolly guy with a short beard who fueled his relentless energy with Mountain Dew and Wendy’s chicken nuggets. He smelled of pot smoke and listened to Phish songs and rooted for the Texas Longhorns. Every chance he could, he brought up Dallas, how he missed it and how much better it was than Oklahoma City, or anywhere for that matter. To him it wasn’t the United States—it was Texas and its forty-nine little sisters. He wasn’t a bad guy, though. I looked up to him. And he looked out for me. When I told him I didn’t have any leads, he was undeterred.
“No problem,” he said. “What we can do is, we’ll train you to be the service guy, a knife sharpener. When an old customer calls in and needs their knives sharpened or new ones, we’ll send you out there, and you can upsell them and build leads for new sales that way. No problem.”
I liked the guy. His energy was infectious, and so when the service calls came in, I tried to relate the same type of energy into my demos. I’d listen to songs Pinkett recommended, Phish jam-band tunes with winding and intricate melodies, sometimes a little metal like GWAR to get me pumped up. I drank Mountain Dew and ate pounds of Wendy’s chicken nuggets. I bought ties from Target and gray, pinstriped suits, stuffing white handkerchiefs in the breast pocket so I’d even look like him. He was young and successful and everything I thought I wanted to be. Pinkett encouraged it, too, giving me tips on how to style my hair, hardening it with a quarter-sized dollop of gel.
In the demos I met the most interesting people: WWII veterans and math prodigies, cello players and conspiracy theorists. There were dog groomers and civil war reenactors. I met bucktoothed equestrian riders and Beanie Babies collectors and even a professional bowler. And I loved it. While a ward of the juvenile correctional facility, I’d met very few people. There were the guards and then there were the inmates. There were the counselors, and there were more guards. My world was confined to cinderblock walls and fluorescent lights and doors that locked from the outside. I didn’t have access to a computer. I had nobody to write. I kept to myself. I played a lot of solitaire and read anything I could get my hands on: gossip magazines, cookbooks, OSHA pamphlets, whatever was at hand. But outside, it was different. I could move freely and talk to whomever I wished. It was exhilarating, like learning to walk all over again.
My first service call was with a housewife. She lived in a nice-sized home with a nice-sized fence and had two nice-sized toddlers. Family portraits lined her walls, the children posing in awkward angles, resting their chins in their hands and kicking their feet up behind them as they lay on their bellies. They were prescribed poses, pretense masquerading as everyday life, photoshopped and directed, but that was okay. I tended to prefer these types of photos to candid shots, shots where people’s faces were long and their eyes were full of sadness. I’d had enough of that.
While I sharpened her knives, she sat at the island and sipped from a coffee mug filled with white wine, half-heartedly reprimanding her two toddlers as they sprinted around the house, touching everything they could in their wake, the walls and books and art and couch and chairs and even my ultra-sharp knives.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said when her three-year-old picked up shears that could slice through copper. “If she loses a finger, she’ll learn a lesson.”
“I’m not sure my manager would agree,” I said as I recovered the shears, and the wife shrugged.
It was a simple, domestic scene, one I imagined occurred countless times each day across America: unruly children, an unkempt home, a bored housewife tipsily chatting up a complete stranger, thankful just to have someone to speak to who wasn’t in diapers, but it intrigued me in a way that was hard to articulate. I felt like a sociologist might, or maybe an astronaut first making contact with alien life, there to study and to listen and to record and then report back home with my findings. I realize this was silly, but I couldn’t help it. Anything that might even hint at normalcy was still novel to me.
“The thing is,” my customer, Mrs. Applebury, said, “I really don’t mind they bought the motorcycle. I really don’t.” She was speaking of her next-door neighbor. “He’s just one of those guys who thinks he’s hot shit. Whatever you want to do with your money is fine by me. As long as you pay taxes like the rest of us, it’s your God-given right to buy whatever the hell you want, but to ride that thing at eleven at night? Revving up the engine like he’s in some cock-measuring contest? I’ve got kids, for Christ’s sake. Young kids. And once they wake up, they don’t get back to bed.” She shook her head like she was being offered food she didn’t like. “Up all hours of the goddamn night. Crying and screaming and just throwing a fit. Only way I can get them to shut up is to rub a little whiskey on their gums. Not that I’d ever admit to that.”
“Sounds terrible,” I said. “I noticed you only have a couple of our knives, Mrs. Applebury. Do you cook often?” I asked.
She poured herself another glass of wine, her third since I’d been there, and scolded her children for jumping on the sofa. “The thing that gets me the most is that I’ve talked to him about it. I asked him politely to please ride before nine p.m. I said please and thank you. I said that. ‘Please.’ To him. To that narcissistic, walking hard-on. You know I caught him looking at my ass the other day? Broad daylight and everything. Right in the middle of his driveway like this was some goddamn peep show. Tongue out, eyes wide. Goddamn disgusting. Made me want to puke. Why do men think they can just do that? Eye a woman like she can be owned?”
“You know, if you do, you might benefit by taking a look at our Homemaker Special. It’s got everything you would ever need: a chef’s knife, utility knife, paring knife, a serrated spreader, bread knife, butcher knife. You name it. Not to mention it comes with a lifetime warranty. Doesn’t matter if it’s in one year, five years, ten years, if you need a piece fixed or replaced, we’ll do it at no charge to you.”
“And you know what he did when he noticed I’d caught him? He winked! Can you believe that? Like I would ever in a million years let that cretin lay a hand on me.”
“If you’re interested, I might even be able to throw in a vegetable peeler for free.”
Her head snapped toward me. “Vegetable peeler?”
That was my first sale. A nine-hundred-dollar block of knives that netted me ninety bucks. And I’d only been in there for an hour. When I left the Appleburys’ home, I vibrated. It was like I levitated. I hadn’t felt that good in years, since my mother and I had arrived in Grove, before we’d promised Scoot something we couldn’t deliver, when everything had been sincere and altruistic, when we’d been doing some good in the world. I felt so good, in fact, I couldn’t wait to call Pinkett and tell him the news.
“Boom!” he yelled through the phone. “Booker for the homemaker! Go big or go home, son!”
And it didn’t diminish after that. After every sale, my skin tingled and my heart rate quickened. My tongue constricted, and I salivated. I could feel the rush of adrenaline and serotonin flood my system because for the first time in a long time, I felt needed and wanted and like I was accomplishing something bigger than myself, and it felt good to feel that way again, even if it was just for a little while, even if it was for selling knives. It felt good to be appreciated.<
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After work, I explored town. I’d leave my apartment without reason or destination and just walk. Oklahoma City was so much different than Bartlesville or Grove, definitely different than juvenile detention. It sprawled in every direction. There were homes and antique shops and bookstores and mechanic’s garages and cafés and museums and bars and restaurants. I visited the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial on one of the first nights I was out. It was dusk when I visited, the place mostly empty with the exception of one family, a mother and father and young son, perhaps five or six, old enough, it seemed, to understand the words his parents were saying but young enough to not yet grasp the gravity of the situation.
The memorial itself was a beautiful place. A large black archway guarded the entrance, the numbers 9:02 sketched into the façade, marking the time the bomb exploded. A reflecting pool illuminated chairs, representing each of the 168 victims. Their names were carved into the chairs, a placard of sorts, not allowing us to forget what had happened that morning in April 1995. The Survivor Tree, an American elm on the north side of the memorial, had provided shade for visitors in the parking lot across the street from the Murrah Building. About a hundred years old, it had been heavily damaged in the bombing, and after investigators had retrieved evidence embedded in the bark, it was slated to be cut down. But it never was, and one year after the blast, survivors and friends and family of the victims had met there for a memorial ceremony when they noticed it had started to bloom. It came to symbolize the Oklahoma spirit, our inimitable will to keep going despite the misery.
I’d been just a child when the bombing happened. I was in elementary school at the time, maybe third or fourth grade. We were living in Bartlesville, and my classmates were competing in a math game, a race to complete multiplication problems on the chalkboard. Two students stood up at the front of the class, and the teacher, behind us, stated aloud a problem, five times eight, say, and the students would have to write the problem on the board along with the solution. When done, the first student to turn around and face the classroom won. I was up at the board, and I had won several in a row. The other students revolved through one by one, and I defeated all of them in turn. I’d made it around the class two or three times, each of them defeated, and finally the teacher, Mrs. Brown, a young, pregnant teacher, said, “Sounds like you need some competition.” She stood and cradled her belly with her hands. “How about this: you beat me, and you can teach math for the rest of the semester.”
Mrs. Brown joined me at the front of the class. I was nervous before we started, my palms a wet paper cup. I was taking on the teacher, the modicum of authority in our day-to-day lives. If I was to beat her, it was like anything was possible. We could rise up and start a revolution. We, for once, the children and not the adults, could be in charge. I’d read Lord of the Flies the previous summer, and I thought everything would be different if I were in charge. Everything would be so much better. Just so much better.
“Let’s make it difficult, though,” she said. “Nothing off our times tables. Let’s get big numbers involved here. Everything has to be greater than twelve. Got it, class?”
“Yes, Mrs. Brown,” they chanted back in unison.
Mrs. Brown selected a student to randomly choose a problem, and she and I stood side by side, me on the right of the chalkboard, and she on the left, chalk and eraser in hand.
“One hundred seventy-four times two hundred eighty-eight.”
We began, writing as fast as we could. I wrote a two, a nine, a three, a one, next line, a zero, a two, a nine, a three, a one, and my hand started to cramp. I’d been writing and writing and writing, and my fingers were slippery with perspiration. Next line, a zero, a zero, an eight, a four, a three, and my pulse quickened, my tongue flexed in anticipation, the electrical synapses firing in my brain because I was ahead; I was doing it; I was going to win. A two, a one, a one, a zero, a five, and I turned around. I’d done it. I’d done it. I’d beat the teacher.
That’s when Mr. Owen, the principal, burst into the classroom. He looked scared and worried, like a man afraid of heights on the edge of a skyscraper, knowing if he just made one wrong move he’d fall straight down to his death.
“Everyone,” he said. “To the library.”
We lined up in a single-file line, and each of us was confused and a little frightened. Nothing like this had ever happened before. We didn’t know what to expect when we got there, and nothing could have prepared us for the images on the large television screen. The front of the building was gone. Like a giant had just sliced it off. There was smoke, and the façade had been burnt black. From the pile of rubble, soot-covered victims ran. They didn’t even know where they were running. They just zigzagged. It didn’t even matter where, just as long as it was away from there. And I couldn’t help but break down. The victims didn’t deserve to suffer. They didn’t deserve to die. It had seemed so random, so unpreventable. It was the first time in my life I’d been struck paralyzed by how important it was to be good to people, how tenuous that goodness was, and how easy it was for someone to take it all away.
CHAPTER 2
I MET A GIRL. SHE WORKED AT SLASHCO AS Pinkett’s assistant. She answered phones, scheduled interviews, and maintained sales records. She was dark-haired and fair-skinned and named Atchley. She didn’t pay much attention to me when we met. Later she told me it was because she’d thought I was a nerd and boring, probably not worth getting to know, but at the time I chalked it up to her being new to the city. She’d come from a small town in southwest Oklahoma called Empire, and right away I was attracted to her. She had this quiet confidence, always so sure of herself. When asked a question, she blinked with disbelief at your inherent stupidity, then answered without inflection but somehow full of aplomb, just the sincerest reply, uttered in the most monotone voice she could muster. She wore dark lipstick and took large bites of bananas and double-decker SONIC Cheeseburgers. She smelled like men’s deodorant and typed by pounding the keys, and every chance I could I tried to talk to her.
Of course, I really didn’t know how to act. During those awkward teenage years when you first started becoming aware of your attraction to other human beings in a way that didn’t involve action figures and BMX bikes, I didn’t have any contact with girls. Inside juvie, there were just teenage boys, horny, hormone-ridden, pubescent boys. And we had no alone time, which meant we had no opportunity for release. Showers were communal, no curtain, nothing. Three boys to a room. Even the toilets didn’t have stalls in them. We never had privacy. We never had the opportunity like other boys to find our parents’ porn mags or peruse naughty websites because our parents weren’t savvy enough to turn on parental controls. Instead, we were always watched. Guards, counselors, cameras, other inmates, didn’t matter if we were naked or clothed, horny or not, someone was always aware of where our hands were at, if our shorts protruded a little farther than they should. Sometimes it became too much, and the bunks shook late at night when one of my roommates thought I’d fallen asleep. I never said a word to them, though, and they never said anything to me, either, when I did the same thing.
The first time I met Atchley was at a work meeting late one night. We always had our meetings about nine p.m. so our days could be filled with sales calls. We were in the big conference room, and in the rows of metal folding chairs sat a very unusual-looking group. There were people of every race and socioeconomic status, Polo-wearing natives and Carhart hillbillies, Maserati-driving rich kids and tattooed black guys. In the back sat a blond-haired girl who eyed the place like she had made a grave mistake. An elderly man with a walker and a hearing aid looked around with the same look, but for probably different reasons. There were moms with oversized purses and twenty-somethings with long beards. Most sat by themselves and didn’t speak to anyone else, obviously not knowing another attendee, myself included. Other than Pinkett, I knew no one. Since starting a week prior, I hadn’t met a single other person who worked for the company. At the time, I didn’t find
any of this strange or worrisome because I had no other relative work experience to compare my situation to.
Pinkett stood at the front of the room alongside a table draped by a white sheet, clapping his hands as The String Cheese Incident blared through a decade-old boom box. As with the other times I’d met with him, he bounced with relentless energy, dancing and moving his shoulders and legs and head, out of sync with the music. Pinkett’s complete lack of shame and inhibition reminded me of Sam in a way—here was a true leader, someone who could inspire others to do better, to do more than they’d originally thought possible. I knew I’d attach myself to him even before I did so. It was almost like an electric magnetism. I felt drawn to him, and there was little I could do to stop it.
Underneath the sheet were bulbous shapes, and behind Pinkett was the sales leaderboard, the five top salespeople’s names illuminated by glitter and neon Sharpie. There was a leader for the week, for the month, and for the year, the three big boards, Pinkett called them. This was the first of such meetings for me, and I couldn’t help but feel a little excited.
“Welcome!” Pinkett said as we all found our seats. He gyrated with energy, his jowls jiggling like a fruitcake. “Take a seat, meet your neighbor, have a Dew, come in, sit down, get comfortable! We got some exciting fucking things going on tonight.”
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