Bookman

by Ed Baldwin

  BOOKMAN

  a novel

  by

  Ed Baldwin

  Published by Brasfield Books

  PO Box 3411, Greeley, Colorado 80633

  Copyright © 1990 by Ed Baldwin

  Library of Congress number 90-082854

  eBook editions by eBooks by Barb for booknook.biz

  This story is dedicated to

  the memory of John Helms,

  a southern boy with the gift.

  We lost him young.

  Acknowledgments

  Barbara Schoichet recognized the good in this story through the faults. She gave me encouragement when I needed it and told me what was wrong and stood by with a whip while I corrected it. Her editing smoothed out the rough spots and made the final product something we are proud of.

  Gerald Morris is THE bookman. Not the one in the story, that is fiction, but in real life. Books were a training ground for so many of us who have gone on and done other things. Gerald was our teacher. He’s still at it.

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  About the Author

  Preface

  BOOKMAN is fiction. None of these things really happened. The place names are real because I thought it was important to give some geographic spine to the story. The events are loosely based on things that happened to me and my friends when I lived and worked in Memphis throughout the 60’s. The characters are invented also.

  When I started the book I thought I was going to write about the life of a door to door salesman. The characters and scenery from the Mid-South soon overshadowed the original story line. I’ve been gone from there for 20 years now. For those who have been there all this time and find some difference in their perceptions of themselves, I say read it again and try to place yourself in 1965.

  This is how you thought about sex, business, race, religion and alcohol. This book describes your scenery, weather, public buildings and law enforcement agencies. I miss Memphis so much I wrote this book to bring it back the way it was, and is, and could be.

  Race relations! How we get along with one another will ultimately decide the fate of the planet. Throughout this story is intertwined our confusion about race relations. One minute we use a derogatory racial slur and the next we are forming a business partnership with trust as a necessary foundation. We are making progress.

  There are still people selling things door to door, but like every other aspect of our lives it is regulated and litigated into something very different from those free wheeling days of 1965.

  The other day some guy came to the door selling a miracle household cleaner and as I listened to him relate its wondrous properties I had a flashback to a young man with a big smile and a heavy briefcase in the summer of ’65 in rural Mississippi. Could I go back for just a couple hours?

  * * *

  Chapter One

  Some days I really miss that old bastard T.J. We never really got along very well—especially at first. That was because I knocked up his daughter. That would piss a man off.

  It was one of those soft summer nights with honeysuckle heavy in the air. We were in the red ’63 Chevy convertible he gave her for graduation. It’s been 27 years and I can still smell the honeysuckle. When Honey told me the news I took it in stride. That’s the way people got married in those days wasn’t it? T.J. owned a big flower shop in Memphis and I just naturally went to work there after the wedding. Sounds simple. It hasn’t been.

  Our son, Phil Jr. is over in West Memphis with Sonny Masters’ youngest boy Amos. They’re supervising our whole crew on our biggest job this year. The dog track decided they needed to spruce up their image and Sonny bid the wildest landscaping plan I ever saw. We are going to do real well on that one. T.J. would have been proud.

  T.J. “Daddy” Towers left us suddenly in 1975. He dropped dead at Justine’s restaurant, a whiskey in one hand, a cigar in the other. He was half through his favorite story about how he got his toes shot off in World War II when suddenly he just turned the oddest shade of blue, not robin’s egg blue, not sky blue, but sort of the blue that can’t even be labeled. Dr. Francisco, during the autopsy, pulled a piece of steak out of the old man’s windpipe big enough to feed a Vietnamese family of six.

  I find myself thinking more about Daddy Towers as I get older. The old bastard never cut me one inch of slack, until that night when I really needed it and now that he’s gone I make sure and keep his cigar humidor full. I never could smoke as many of them as he did and whenever I bite the end off of one of those black stinkers it feels kind of good to feel his presence fill his office, my office now.

  We all panicked when T.J. died. He was the founder of Towers of Flowers and made all the decisions. Now if you were to ask the bankers and lawyers and accountants who runs the place they’d probably say me. In fact with Phil Jr. and Sonny’s boys working full time and Pig’s daughter doing the arrangements, I’d say old Towers of Flowers is bigger and better off than it ever was. Yeah, I suppose I’m the boss here now, but I don’t tell people what to do, mostly it’s the other way around. I got here by luck and by making every mistake there is to be made.

  It really started in 1965. I was 20 and sure I knew everything. Then I saw an ad in the Commercial Appeal.

  MANAGEMENT TRAINEE Large International Co. seeking aggressive young men. No experience needed. Will train in advanced marketing. Must be HS grad and free to travel, $112/wk to start. Call 355-6602, 9-12 only.

  Desperation was setting in. Not yet old enough to vote and already I was caught in one of life’s cul-de-sacs—I was stranded in Daddy Tower’s greenhouse, potting rubber plants and chasing spider mites. I was imprisoned, sentenced to a lifetime of delivering begonias to fat old ladies at Baptist Hospital. I was doomed because I “did the right thing,” and now I would forever live on the bottom rung of the Towers of Flowers corporate ladder at minimum wage.

  All this for an act committed with the full consent and technical advice of his daughter, Honey, in the backseat of her new, red convertible, the one he gave her when she graduated from High School, the one I will always remember as the machine I ended my life in.

  Honey didn’t suffer, nor did little Phil. Daddy and Momma Towers paid our rent, bought most of our groceries and clothes. They even paid the doctor bills for the baby. As for myself, I lost pretty much everything, my self-esteem, my freedom, my youth.

  “Management for a change,” I said out loud to myself as I cranked up the Towers of Flowers van and laid a strip of rubber out the back driveway. That pissed him off as much as slapping his prize daughter’s fat ass in front of her mother.

  “Advanced Marketing!” I hooted as I double clutched it and hit another streak in second, praying that the old man could hear.

  I’d seen the ad while taking a smoke break in the back greenhouse, where the hard work was done. T.J. only came back there to chew ass or send us out to trim trees at the hottest time of day. He especially liked to watch people shovel gravel.

  “I’m free to travel!” I shouted at the top of my lungs as I cleared the first intersection. No siree, that was certainly not going to be a problem. I’d even thought about volunteering for the draft to get out of this miserable life.

  I cranked it up good and sped toward Baptist Hospital.

  By the time I got there I was in a pretty good mood. I even listened to Mrs. Astrachan’s account of her gallbladder operation, again. It was already about a quarter past noon but I called the number in the ad anyw
ay. A man answered on the second ring and eagerly gave me an appointment for the next morning. I was ecstatic and simply could not face going back to the shop so I called and told one of the girls in the office to tell T.J. the oil light was on in the van and I was going to get it looked at. Then I went to Bennies to play pool.

  There’s something about a dark cool pool room on a hot summer day that lifts the spirit. I took Bennie in three out of five racks of nine ball and finished two drafts in those frozen mugs he keeps way back in the freezer. By four I felt great and ready to face whatever this new job was all about.

  “Daddy called,” Honey said as I came in the door. I had detoured around the pool on the way in. It was just open for the summer and there was some great talent out there.

  “I was delivering another plant to a loyal customer,” I snorted. “If that old bitch has any more surgery there won’t be anything left to send flowers to.”

  “Shit! I’ll bet you were at Bennie’s.”

  “Bennie needed me,” I confessed.

  Honey took a long draw from her Pepsi and adjusted the straps of her bathing suit. There had been a lot of Pepsi under the bridge since Germantown High School and Honey’s figure was maturing fast. Once she had been lean and tan and eager.

  We had one of those after graduation before college romances. She was wanting to be worldly before going off to college and getting into the sorority thing. I was the guy who pumped gas down at my uncle’s station. Funny, she never seemed to notice me until after graduation even though we were in lots of classes together. Then boom! Honey went off to Ole Miss and by the end of her first semester her belly was too big for her cheerleader’s uniform. Mortified, she quit and came home to ruin my life.

  I must say that old T.J. did do one thing that I truly respected. He came down to the station to talk about “Our future as a family” instead of just coming right out and asking me to marry his daughter.

  And Honey? She acted like nothing had ever happened. When friends from Ole Miss stopped by, which was less often than they used to, she talked a mile a minute and acted as if she were still down there with them. It was, “His granddaddy was a senatah,” and “She had the most lovely voice in the whole state of Mississippi,” and “it was such a lovely pahty. They had a huge crystal bowl in the middle of the table with a magnolia floatin’ right in it.”

  My fault? Her fault? Fate? The stars? All I know is I got a job potting rubber plants and she got a diaper pail instead of a crystal punch bowl. Needless to say, there was some tension in our relationship.

  “You been hangin’ around Sandy again?” Honey said suspiciously.

  “The pool opened, dummy. I’ve been out there trying to see if you still have the biggest tits in Shelby County.” I was in the mood to argue.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t just behave and do what Daddy tells you. Momma says Daddy comes home half the time so mad at you he can’t even eat supper.”

  “He isn’t exactly wasting away. Besides all he ever wants me to do is shit work. Pot some rubber plants. Deliver to Mrs. Astrachan. Dig fucking holes along the interstate over by West Memphis.” Now I was really working up a fine fighting sweat.

  “He just wants you to start at the bottom, like he did.”

  “At the bottom and under his thumb and for a lousy $60.00 a week. I don’t know anyone who works for that.”

  “That’s what he pays the colored boys,” Honey said innocently, just to clear up the misunderstanding.

  “Sonny Masters ain’t payin’ for no Cadillac with $60 a week.”

  “Sonny’s been there for ten years. Daddy says you haven’t learned anything in two years and don’t deserve a raise. Besides, since our groceries and rent are taken care of, we’re doing just fine on what you make.”

  “Why doesn’t he just pay me a decent wage and let me pay my own goddamned rent?” I picked up one of her magazines and threw it at the window, then I went into the kitchen for a beer.

  Killing the first one in two swallows, I popped the second. For just a moment I put myself in old T.J.’s shoes. To him, I was from a long line of redneck trash and he was aristocracy. It wasn’t true, but he saw it that way. A family with money and a business in Memphis is aristocracy and a family that farms 220 acres in western Tennessee is redneck. It must have really galled him to lie awake at night, worrying about a pregnant daughter and trying to fight back visions of her tangled up with a wiseass worthless farmer’s son in the back seat of that convertible. If he had seen a vision of how it really happened he would have jumped off a bridge.

  I belched loudly and hurled the second into the trash. There was no reply from the other room. With the third I walked back into the living room and contemplated my options. I felt like he was there, watching.

  “Get naked!” I said, throwing her movie magazine into the corner. Sex is fun when you’re in love. Sex is fine when you’re bored. Sex can be fantastic when you’re pissed off.

  She looked up with mock astonishment. Her head went up and her chin went down like an old grannie looking at you over her glasses. “What?” she said, but the look added, “In the middle of the afternoon? Why you crude son-of-a-bitch!”

  I took a step forward with my best, “I’ll beat your ass!” look, and she kicked off her shoes and headed for the bedroom, protesting and undressing at the same time. I dropped my jeans and toppled her onto the bed in one motion. I reveled in the thought of old T.J. watching as I screwed his daughter in abandoned frenzy. We lay there after, anger and passion spent.

  Not your typical marital relationship? Who knows what primordial winds whip the flames of passion in the average suburban bedroom. Let he whose soul is free of conflict and frustration cast the first stone and all the rest of you kinky perverts keep your hands in your pockets.

  My appointment was in the Sterick Building in downtown Memphis. A little seedy, but at 33 stories it was the third tallest building in town and very much a prestige address. People in the halls and lobby rushed around with a sense of purpose I hadn’t felt for awhile. I was 10 minutes early and already there were a dozen applicants lined up at the still locked door.

  I assessed my competition. They were all young men, under 25, some looked to be just out of high school. Although they all wore ties, some didn’t look natural in them, others were very well dressed. I had resurrected my only sport coat from the rubble of my closet and judged myself to look as much like a business executive trainee as any of the rest.

  “You got any idea what this is all about?” I asked the one standing closest to me.

  “A job, I guess,” was his non-committal answer. Clearly the competitive nature of the interview was uppermost on his mind. I remained in silence until time for the interview.

  Finally, the door was opened and we were let into the offices of P.F. Collier, Inc. There was a fairly large waiting room, worn like it had been in use for some time. We filled out applications which were taken into the manager’s office. Then we waited while one at a time the group was called in to speak with the manager. My turn was about midway.

  “Lanny Friedman here.” He bounded around a huge walnut desk and pumped my hand energetically. He was short and wore a suit. His hair was kinky and obviously uncombable so he had sculpted a part in it. It added at least an inch to his height. He bounced back behind the desk as quickly as he had come and began to peruse my application. After a few clarifying questions he leaned back in his chair.

  “I think you may have a place in this company, Phil. Please forgive us for not disclosing more about the job over the phone. We are not ready to publicize what we are doing just yet and have to be careful when dealing with the general public. P.F. Collier is a large international company specializing in marketing new products. There are many positions in the company, but the one you have applied for is that of marketing specialist. From this position you could be promoted into sales, personnel, or even our international division. Does it sound interesting so far, Phil?”

  “
Yes sir!” I said enthusiastically. I was impressed. I was curious, too. He had an odd way of speaking in complete sentences, with no slang. I assumed this was the executive way of doing things in these higher circles of business. The offer sounded too good to be true so far.

  “Do you meet the public well, Phil ?” he asked, with sudden concern.

  “I’ve been in the flower business. I meet a lot of people.”

  “Good. I think you’re our man. We’ll check out your references, of course, but I can tell you now that you’re hired. We still have some other applicants to screen and won’t be needing you any more today. Be here at 10 o’clock in the morning and we can begin your training. This preliminary training will take three days. If, at the end of that time you measure up, you will go on the payroll. Now that you are a member of the team we’ll expect you to wear a coat and tie at all times and to maintain a businesslike manner whenever you are around the office. Any questions?”

  Before I could think of anything to ask, Lanny bounded out from behind the desk again and shook my hand. Another man who I hadn’t seen lounging in the side door, entered and showed me out through another office to the hall. With a pat on the back he advised me to be prompt in the morning, but not early.

  When I got home from the interview and told everyone I’d found a new job, Honey went into a tizzy. “Daddy is so upset!” she wailed. “You didn’t even let him know you were leaving. He had such hopes you would want to work in the business. The FAMILY business!”

  “Your family business, not mine. And, your father is an asshole.”

  She turned on the tears. “I’m sorry, Phil. I got you into this. I’d always wanted to be married to someone who joined my family. I dreamed of the big reunions where the girls and their husbands and children would all gather at Daddy’s and be so happy. I would imagine you and Daddy working together and when he got old you just taking over and BEING Daddy all over again.”