Bookman

by Ed Baldwin

  I hadn’t been prepared for so much candor. “Shit, Honey, I’m not T.J Towers, and never will be. I’m Phil Lazar, nothing more. I want to make my own way in this world and not follow in some other man’s footsteps, especially his.”

  “Phil, can’t you just be a little patient?” she bawled, falling to the floor at my feet and looking up at me with mascara running down her cheeks.

  “Patient? You want me to continue depending on his charity to feed and keep a roof over my family instead of his paying a decent wage like any reasonable man would to his own son-in-law. He’s trying to see how much I’ll take before moving on and finding a decent job on my own. I’m sure he doesn’t have any more respect for me putting up with this for two years than I have for myself. It’s all over now. I’ve got a job and I’m not going back down to that goddamned flower shop again as long as I live!”

  The finality of the words had a nice, authoritative ring to it that appealed to me. I was considering another tirade when Honey ran into the bedroom and locked the door.

  “Hey! Just because I’m not going to be working for your father doesn’t mean I don’t want you anymore. Why not give it a try? Wouldn’t you rather be the wife of a business executive than a delivery boy? When your friends drop by you can talk about “business trips” and my office downtown. You’ll get to know some of the other wives, make new friends.”

  There remained silence on the other side of the door. She had seemed relatively content being married to me. Now, with a change in occupation looming it was coming all unraveled. I went back into the living room and sat down, contemplating my future. I thought about closing big business deals in fancy restaurants, making executive decisions, and most of all, sitting behind that walnut desk Lanny sat behind.

  The next day, sitting in Lanny’s office listening to him extol the virtues of P.F. Collier, Inc., I knew I had made the right decision.

  “Gentlemen, you are the cream of the crop. From all of the applicants we have screened, you are the ones selected to become marketing specialists for P.F. Collier, Inc. We are rushed, and only have a few days to complete your training. Our product goes on sale in only a few months and your work must be done by then.” Lanny paced the office behind the big walnut desk and gestured freely.

  With me in the office were two other young men, about my own age. They were college students on summer vacation.

  “The product we are marketing is here.” Lanny pointed to a bookcase beside his desk that contained a large set of books, brightly colored black and red with gold design. “A1 Martin, have you ever seen a set of Collier’s Encyclopedias?”

  Al Martin, a round faced, round bodied teenager from Senatobia, Mississippi who was currently flunking out of Memphis State, replied, “Uh, I don’t remember.”

  “How about you, Phil Lazar?”

  “Yes Sir. I’ve seen them.” I lied. I’d heard the name. There may have been a set in the study hall at Germantown High School, but I’d been too interested in trying to look up girl’s dresses to pay much attention.

  “Our corporate name has a good reputation and naturally we intend to keep it that way by bringing out only the finest in new products.” With that he began to tell the story of the new 24 volume Collier’s Encyclopedia that was going to be released in a few months. We were to find families interested in “educational benefit” and sign them up for a special free offer. All they had to do was buy the yearbooks and pay for the reference service and it would be theirs.

  “How do we find these families?” I asked, after deciding I could handle giving the presentation he was demonstrating.

  “Door to door,” was his simple answer. He watched our faces for reaction. This had not occurred to any of us. It had occurred to some of the other applicants. The time had come to separate the wheat from the chaff.

  “Does that bother anybody?” Lanny asked nonchalantly. He made it sound like it was the most natural thing in the world to walk up and down the street and knock on people’s doors and try to tell them this story. All I knew was that it sounded better than the greenhouse. “If not, then this is your trainer, Terry Howell.”

  “Good morning, gentlemen. Follow me into the training room and I’ll issue you your training materials,” Terry said as he led us out of Lanny’s office. He was taller and thinner with a wrinkled black suit and a black and gold tie. The long greasy black hair with a ducktail in back seemed to fit the beak he had for a nose in front. He had a nervous habit of pulling up his sleeves which seemed to always be a little bit too long, no matter which of his of his two black suits he wore.

  The training room was a classroom size with chairs in rows and a blackboard in front. The windows along the side looked out on the parking lot behind the Sterick Building and Rosen’s Deli across it.

  Several other young men were seated in chairs arranged in small circles reciting the presentation to each other. Terry gave each of us part of a legal pad and began to dictate from memory the sales presentation we had just heard. I wondered why they didn’t just print it out. After we’d copied down half of it, our assignment for the night, we listened to students hired the day before practice what they’d learned and begin on the second half.

  Thomas (not Tom or Tommy) Cathards, a wild eyed student from Arkansas State was still living in Jonesboro some 60 miles distant until he was sure he had a job for the summer.

  “What do you think of them fuckers, Mrs. Jones?” Thomas said triumphantly as he lifted a full broadside of the ends of the entire 24 volume set from his briefcase and laid them at Al Martin’s feet. Al was pretending to be the lady of the house for Thomas to practice his delivery.

  “That’s not what the presentation says!” Terry broke in. “it’s, ‘I think you’ll be impressed with the quality of the binding, here’s a sample of what the entire set would look like in your bookcase.’ Try to get it right, and if you’re not sure, ASK.”

  Thomas plodded along with the rest of it, ad libbing whenever he didn’t know a line and had us all laughing, including Terry.

  Hearing the laughter, Lanny strode in, the picture of authority. “Just give it the way we taught you, Thomas. If you start making up parts of the presentation you’ll get us all in trouble. Remember, we work for Crowell, Collier, and MacMillan. We’ve got to act the part.” A businesslike calm fell over the remainder of the morning’s proceedings.

  We were an excited group during lunch. We had begun calling each other by our last names; Mr. Lazar and Mr. Martin, rather than first names. The others in the office talked like that and it seemed so much more businesslike. That night Thomas was to go out with Terry to observe him at work and maybe knock on a few doors himself. He was sure of the job now and moving in with one of the other new men who had an apartment in Memphis.

  “I’m gonna place so many of those libraries Memphis is gonna glow red and black from the air,” Thomas said as he rechecked his briefcase for the third time.

  As I left Walgreens there seemed to be a little more spring in my step. I found myself assessing the people I met in the halls and lobby and on the street, judging where they were on the ladder of success, compared with myself. Maybe it was the coat and tie instead of the delivery uniform but I wouldn’t have traded places with many of them.

  The realization of the change became more acute as I threw the briefcase they had given me into the convertible and backed out of the parking space behind the Sterick Building. Always before when I delivered flowers to the building I had parked in the delivery area and kind of sneaked into the back door. Now Downtown Memphis had a different feel. I saw the big bank buildings, the men’s stores, the jewelry stores, the pretty girls, and said to myself, “I belong here.”

  I took the long way home, down to Riverside Drive along the Mississippi River. Muddy and high with the melting snows from some far off mountain range, the Mississippi boils by this center of commerce like it has a mind of its own. But, Memphis controls this river, just as surely as if the city had somehow summoned a
ll this water from so far away to be used just for its purposes. Controlled on the sides by banks of levees, spanned by bridges and plied by barges, the river is just another aspect of the commerce of the Mid-South. I was a part of that commerce now. Lanny had said that from Memphis we would range out and conquer the Mid-South for Colliers. Me and the Mississippi, headed south out of Memphis in the name of Business!

  “I can’t believe you really have a job!” Honey said when I got home. She must have thought all along that her father was doing me a big favor by employing me at Towers of Flowers. “Wait until I tell Carol and Sue Ann that you’re working in the Sterick Building.” Honey was beginning to warm to this white collar stuff.

  “Not only that, Lanny says you can really advance fast if you produce.”

  “Produce what?” she asked.

  “Results. You know, place libraries with qualified families. I began to daydream out loud about the success that seemed to be just around the corner.

  “Didn’t you say you had to learn something by tomorrow?” Honey broke into my reverie.

  “Oh shit, yes. If I don’t I’ll be back potting petunias.” I quickly recovered my handwritten notes and began hitting it so hard throughout the afternoon that by evening I could give the whole presentation without notes.

  That night was Momma Towers’ birthday and it was mandatory that everyone show at the homestead out in Germantown. I may have severed my relationship with Towers of Flowers, but I was still a part of the “family,” so I put on my best suit and tie, albeit with some misgivings. So far T.J. and I had never had words about my new job. I wanted to keep things friendly with this enigma of a man who I had the nerve to call T.J., but who nearly everyone else, family or not, called “Daddy.” It might as well have been “Boss.”

  Daddy Towers was a tall, fat, bald, cigar chewing loud mouth. He thought every word he spoke was hilariously funny or studded with wisdom. He would launch into long tirades about Jews or the government or proper soil preparation, but his favorite tirade of all remained the success story of one, Thomas J. Towers. I must have sat through the story at least a dozen times. Tonight was no different. Only this time instead of corralling me into listening, he got a hold of poor Waylon, Honey’s brother-in-law who was the assistant manager at a discount store in Blytheville, Arkansas. Of course, anyone within shouting range, had to listen to the old man bellow out his tale.

  “Yup! Got ’em both shot off before I even knew a weapon had been drawn,” he’d say, puffing up proud as a prize bull. (He was talking about how he came out of World War II, a private first class minus two toes.) “Jobs were scarce in those early days after the war, and I had a pregnant wife to consider so I used my disabled veteran’s status to get a job with the city ahead of a long line of other applicants.” (He would usually tap his temple with his bony index finger and wink at the rest of us who obviously would have never used our noggin the way he had.) “Anyway, I became a gardener at the new city zoo, and that’s where the seed of Towers of Flowers was first planted.” (About that point he’d usually throw in a dramatic pause.)

  “Although I didn’t know anything about gardening, I managed to get along pretty well.” (What he always managed to leave out was that he got along well because all the actual work was done by blacks.) “You see, mine was largely a supervisory job, or maybe ceremonial would be a better word. I liked it and learned what I could from the men who worked under me. I also learned that the reason a neophyte like me could get along in that job was the zoo bought all their shrubbery and bedding plants from an outside nursery, at premium prices, without competitive bidding.

  “Well as it turns out, the old Stone political machine that ran Memphis at the time also had control over nearly every flower shop, greenhouse and nursery in town. It also controlled the flowers in the city zoo. And that,” he’d say putting his arm around whoever was nearest, “is where I saw my opening. I became acquainted with one of Old Man Stone’s cronies in the nursery business. I must admit, I did play the role of an eager young man anxious to advance in the world to a tee.”

  “Anyway, when I asked for advice I was given suggestions that resulted in larger, more expensive orders from the nursery. I would visit the nursery and note what seemed to be in generous supply and order quantities of whatever it was.” (Finally the self-assured smile of a man proud of infiltrating the powerful, crept onto his face.) “Perhaps my greatest attribute at the time was in being able to find places to put it all,” he’d laugh from deep in his belly.

  “Anyway, to make a long story short”—(which was impossible for a windbag like T.J.)—“I was soon promoted, apparently having been noticed by Stone, ‘the machine,’ as the town used to call him, and before I had been there two years I had two assistants and was the head gardener for the zoo. But I had clearly become too big for that job,”—(a modest man, T.J. was)—“so I left the zoo and went to work for the nursery, primarily as a liaison with all the other gardeners who worked for the city. They would ask my advice, aware of my meteoric rise in the system, and I sold them bedding plants, shrubbery and trees that made the most profit for the nursery.”

  (Usually seeing his listeners’ eyes glaze over about that time—poor Waylon was probably wishing he was checking out divorced women in the K-Mart aisles—T.J. would race through to the last part of his saga—his favorite part where he became the kingpin in the flower biz and Stone was pushing up daisies).

  “By 1955 I was a full partner. The political situation in Memphis had clearly become a lot more democratic. A year later, I owned the business entirely. Stone’s crony dropped dead of heart failure, and had no heirs who wanted to fight root rot the way I did. Somehow, I managed to keep a large share of the city’s business, but it was more competitive now.” (He’d rub the palms of his hands together, unable to contain how he relished competition.)

  “You know those pink dogwood trees along Belvedere Boulevard?” he asked Waylon, who even though he was nearly unconscious, managed an interested nod. “That was my first killing after the Stone machine lost power. The pink dogwood had just been developed, and I bought all the supplier had, at a premium. Then I had some branches from mature, flowering trees flown in from Atlanta and displayed prominently at the spring flower show in Memphis. The local garden clubs went crazy over the way they contrasted with the usual white dogwood. They convinced the city fathers that the landscaping that was being done that year along Belevedere must include pink dogwood in groupings with white. Ha! I had the only pink dogwood in the Mid-South!” (He’d always have to shake his head in awe of himself at that point.) “I made enough from those few thousand dogwood trees to pay off the heirs of the former owner and have the nursery free and clear.”

  The Daddy Towers Story finally told for the evening, Waylon, who actually had a degree from Memphis State and had “chosen” to assiduously study the finer points of selling cheap junk to poor people, decided to break into in the action to toot his own horn for awhile.

  “That’s what this retail game is all about, T.J.—anticipating an opportunity in the marketplace and then being in a position to capitalize on it. “Waylon lit another cigarette, his tenth at least since we had finished dinner.

  “Just last week we moved over a hundred galvanized steel garbage cans. The city took over the trash business from a bankrupt private operation and immediately demanded everyone have a steel can. We were ready with more cans than we sold all last year. Garbage cans are in my department, I might add,” he concluded proudly.

  “Tell him about the hairspray, Waylon,” his wife, Carolyn, piped up with an innocent look on her face.

  “Oh, that was just a situation we got into. We’ll work out of it in time,” he said as he put out the cigarette he had just lit. He looked irritated, whetting my appetite to find out more about the marketing of hairspray.

  “Did you corner the market in hairspray, Waylon?” I asked, suddenly correcting the slouch that had characterized my stance at these family gatherings for the p
ast two years.

  “Well, we just overestimated the market’s ability to assimilate a certain product,” he said defensively.

  “By a trailer truckload,” Carolyn said with a sly grin.

  I was beginning to like Carolyn. Instead of her snide comments referring to me as “Daddy’s delivery boy,” or “Honey’s gigolo,” now she was turning her bile toward poor old beergut Waylon, with his myriad nervous habits and poor digestion. He lit another cigarette and looked like gas attack was on the way.

  “You bought a trailer truck load of hairspray?” I asked, not giving in.

  “Two actually. We managed to move one of them over the fourth of July sale,” he said, recovering somewhat, but leaving the fate of the second truck load in doubt.

  He was rescued by a crash and an infantile scream that sent the whole family running into one of the bedrooms. One of his ill-mannered children, little Millie, I think it was, had pulled the baby’s crib over. She had climbed up the side of the crib to paste a paper mustache on my sleeping son and had pulled the whole contraption over on herself. There seemed to be more furor than damage so I went into the kitchen for a beer.

  Honey called Millie a spoiled brat. Carolyn called Honey a lard ass. Honey called Carolyn a skinny bitch, and I went out to wait by the car. The recriminations and then the apologies dragged on and were too much even for Waylon, who came out to join me in the yard.

  “Here, it’ll help your gas,” I said as I handed him one of the beers from the six pack I had taken from the refrigerator.

  He belched before he took a polite sip and then set it down on the hood of Honey’s convertible. “I just can’t understand why they can’t just have a Sunday dinner like any normal family,” he said.

  He really looked uncomfortable. He had eaten like there was no tomorrow and now was paying for it. His ample belly was straining at the bounds of his dress shirt, the tail of which was hanging out in back. While we talked about the Towers girls and their legendary arguments he broke wind with every other sentence. I moved upwind of him and bummed a cigarette.