Bookman

by Ed Baldwin

  “What’s your bail?” I asked, curious to determine who they considered more dangerous.

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “Shit,” I said to myself, wondering if my higher bail indicated I was considered a bigger risk to society or if it was just an acknowledgement of our differing economic circumstances.

  After a while his wife came in. She was a very dark, chubby teenager with a baby. She brought him some cigarettes and a hot dog, which he ate while they talked, off to one side of the barred wall. They kissed and she left. He sat back down. He was smiling.

  “She goin’ back to live with her mother,” he said with satisfaction. In five minutes he was asleep, feet stretched out from the bench, head resting on the water tank.

  It was after midnight when Gerald finally figured out where I was and came in to spring me. He paid the bail and I was free again, really a fine feeling after even a few hours in jail.

  The other guys hadn’t had such a great evening either. There was only one order in the whole crew. Everybody was tired from drinking and playing cards every night and we had written plenty of orders so we decided to head on into Memphis by 3:00 a.m. a day early.

  Honey was surprised to see me, but I didn’t see any signs of occupancy on the other side of the bed. After a welcome home celebration that must have lasted for an hour, I slept until 1:00 the next day.

  I washed the car and sat with the baby while Honey went to the beauty shop. When I worked at the flower shop she had done it herself. Now that I was in the chips she went weekly. She was going to get something special done for the party at Lanny’s.

  True to his word, Lanny had laid in a supply of booze adequate for a group twice as large. All the guys were there, mostly with dates and dressed in their best duds. In spite of the veneer of business titles and formal introductions the small talk was about who wrote how many orders, “mooches” we had seen, Thomas getting drunk and vomiting in the bathtub, jails, and most of all, Gerald and the Holiday Inn Manager.

  Honey attracted a lot of attention with her naturally blond hair frosted with strands of silver and a low cut dress that showed off her Olympic sized tits. She loved it, of course, drank too much rum and Pepsi and was sick by ten o’clock.

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  Monday morning at the office was a stark contrast to the merriment at the party on Friday night. College had started at Memphis State and most of the other area colleges. That meant that most of the guys, including Gerald, were students again. I kind of felt left out, being the only one of the bunch not studying something. Even Al Martin had decided in favor of academia at the last minute.

  Lanny and Barney were concerned about other things. Lanny had won some obscure aspect of the summer contest and was leaving the next day for Japan. That meant Barney would be in charge for the week and I was back to being a common salesman again, riding out of his car.

  As Barney listened to Lanny drone on about the opportunities ahead I stared off into the miserable rain that seemed like it would never let up. A hurricane had hit the gulf coast the night I was in jail and we were getting its effects now. A storm was brewing inside me, too. I did not want to be under anybody’s wing anymore. Not since I had had a taste of leadership. Silently, I looked out the window at the rain and began to map a strategy for getting a crew of my own again.

  Suddenly Lanny said something about hot new territory he’d been saving and my attention was drawn back into the room. He was pacing with excitement. “In the summer the students work the hard stuff, in the winter”—it was the first week in September, but the rain seemed to be a preamble to what was coming—“we work the easy stuff. You know those garden apartments over on University, the Cabanas out by the airport? Well let me tell you boys, it’s really hot stuff. Untouched since last spring.” Lanny pretended to put his thumb in an imaginary pie and pull out a juicy plum. The metaphor was interesting, so was the prospect of a change in territory, but it was ambition that whetted my appetite.

  The rain grew steadily worse and by 5:00 there was a wind to go with it. The streets were flooded and it was too bad even to work garden apartments. Lanny couldn’t very well call off the night just before being gone for a week, so we hit the high-rises. I got the Shelbourne, a two building complex with a restaurant under one and a night club under the other. That was our meeting place. There was a sign in the lobby about no soliciting, but nobody to enforce it. I started at the top.

  The high-rise is the fastest way to work, with the lowest concentration of good prospects. If you have to knock on the doors instead of ring doorbells everyone on the floor knows something is up and gets curious. If you stay on the floor very long the manager will be up with the cops. In the absence of doorbells, you hit a couple of doors, then drop down to the next floor and come back later. There are a lot of single people and a lot of people who are not at home. When you do hit a young couple they tend to be natural mooches; nobody ever works high rises and they have a very low sales resistance.

  “Hi. Phil Lazar here, we’re talking to all the young families in the area. Got a minute?”

  “Sure, come on in.” The guy must have been about 24, innocent, he let me in without hesitation. The place was crackerjack small, an efficiency with hardly enough room to turn around. I went over to one of the two chairs and sat down.

  Small as the place was, it was tastefully furnished and had several really strange paintings on the walls. One was filled with brightly colored geometric shapes. It was a huge canvas that nearly took up a whole wall and it had a blue, anguished looking face peering out from behind a cube in one corner. I stared at it for a moment while he went around the partition to the bedroom to get some cigarettes.

  “Like it?” he asked, returning.

  “It’s different,” I said, trying not to offend.

  During the small talk I learned he was single but interested in whatever I might be doing. I figured he could probably afford 12 bucks a month, and it would be an opportunity to hide from the resident manager for a few minutes, if nothing else. I started the interview.

  He was an art teacher at a local high school and not really interested in books. He let me know that right away, so the interview went quickly. “Well,” I said, rising to leave, “I guess that disqualifies you.”

  “I was just going to make some tea,” he said as he jumped up. His sophisticated, confident manner cracked a bit in his haste.

  “I’ve got to get on with it,” I said with a smile and headed toward the door.

  “Maybe you could come back later, for some tea?” he said with a nervous smile as I stepped out into the hall, anxious to leave now that I knew what he had in mind. I never liked tea anyway.

  I skipped down to the next floor thinking maybe they put all the queers on one floor. The guy seemed nice enough, but I didn’t want to go through that again. This time, I decided to find out if it was a married couple for sure before going in again when a young woman in a blue terrycloth bathrobe invited me in before I could ask.

  She was almost as tall as I was with her hair in a plastic baglike affair that hooked into a hair dryer. Just as I came in the phone rang and she motioned for me to sit down while she answered it. Her eyes went from me to my briefcase and back to me while she listened. She didn’t say anything during the brief conversation and then said, “OK, tomorrow night,” and hung up.

  Her jaw was tightened in a look of anger or frustration and there were tears in her eyes but she didn’t say anything. She turned quickly and I thought she was going to run into the bedroom to cry, leaving me to let myself out, but she went into the kitchen instead and came back with a beer which she set down in front of me. Still without saying anything she went back into the kitchen and got another beer. She opened it and took as big a sip as would be lady like and came back into the living room, tears streaming down her face now.

  “I’m sorry. Please wait just a minute until I can get my head out of this thing.” She pulled at the back on her h
ead. “Oh, shit. I’ll be right back.” Then she disappeared into the bedroom for a good ten minutes.

  I sipped my beer and looked around the place. The furniture matched, like it had been bought all at the same time or was rented, and there was one of those tacky city skyline at night paintings over the couch. The drapes were open onto the balcony and beyond them I could see the parking lot with the rain still coming down hard. I was glad we had decided to work indoors even if it looked like I wasn’t going to further my career any tonight.

  The condensation on the windows made halos out of the street lights in the parking lot below. I could see a lone figure walking this way from the next apartment building a block away. I couldn’t see a briefcase, but I was fairly sure it was Barney, either with a deal already or kicked out by the resident manager. Suddenly I heard a noise and turned around.

  Still in her bathrobe, the woman was standing there, looking quite different with her hair out of the bag. And beautiful hair it was, too—shoulder length and red as a ripe tomato. She looked fresh and there was no sign of the tears anymore. She was a vision.

  “What are you selling?” she asked with a warm smile as she sat down and looked at my briefcase.

  “Encyclopedias,” I said, not wanting to go through the whole interview.

  “I haven’t read a book in six months,” she said, crossing one leg underneath her on the chair.

  “I must have come at a bad time.” I nodded at the telephone.

  “I was stood up,” she said with a smile. It didn’t seem to be bothering her too much now.

  “That shows poor judgment on somebody’s part.” I smiled back.

  “The life of a kept woman is not easy.” After she said this she watched closely for my reaction. I gave none.

  “You look like a woman any man would be happy to keep if he could.”

  Perhaps I laid it on a little thick, but it got the desired result. She blushed a little and tucked her legs under her more tightly. She looked pleased.

  “It isn’t as glamorous as I thought it was going to be. He owns a big cotton company and drives around in a white Cadillac that just takes your breath away. He even has a phone in it. When I first met him I couldn’t believe anyone had that much money. I worked at Union Planters Bank and he would come in every week or so to cash a check for a couple thousand dollars—’walking around money’ he called it. He always came to my window, even if he had to wait.” She was playing with the top of her beer, silent for a minute or so, apparently remembering some private moments.

  “Does he really have that much or is it just show?”

  “He really has it. I looked at his balance a lot. There was always more money in the account. One time the Vice President stepped off the elevator just as he was leaving and stopped to shake his hand and asked him to go to lunch. He said, “I’d love to Bob’—he called the Vice President by his first name—but I already have a date.” That date, of course, was me, and I nearly died of embarrassment. I was lucky I didn’t get fired,” she said, pausing and flashing another private smile that would just melt your heart. “In fact, I even got a raise right after that little incident.” She threw back her head and laughed gaily.

  “He’s married, I take it.”

  “Oh yes. Pillar of the community and all that. He lives out in East Memphis. He won’t take me anywhere at night. Says he knows everyone in town. One time when I complained about not ever going out he drove me to Little Rock for dinner. Then he took me to Vegas the next week.”

  “Sounds like an easy guy to like. How old is he?”

  “Forty-eight.”

  “So what’s his problem tonight?” I said not blinking an eye although I realized he was probably at least twice her age.

  “Church meeting. At least that’s what he said, probably taking his fat cow of a wife out somewhere.” She got up and stormed into the kitchen, returning seconds later calm as you please with another beer. Before she opened it she stopped and looked at me.

  “You want beer or somethin’ else.”

  “Is it his?” I asked with a smile.

  “No. The beer’s mine; he drinks scotch. Want some of that?” She came into the living room and opened a cabinet filled with expensive scotch.

  “I’ll take the beer.”

  She opened the beer immediately and brought it to me, not opening another for herself. She sat down in the chair again and her mood changed back to bright smiles and light conversations.

  “By the way, I’m Paris.”

  “Phil,” I said, raising my beer to her.

  We talked about where we went to high school and which was our favorite rock star for a while. When she smiled and stretched her arms above her head, I knew the promised land was at hand.

  She stood up and dropped the robe, revealing a shortie nightgown with a see through top. She walked over to me.

  “I guess you’re going to get what he was going to get.” When she got to me, she bent over to kiss me and all I could see was tits and hair. It was wonderful.

  She had some ideas about sex that hadn’t occurred to me yet, and I had considered myself a sort of expert. The activities started on the couch and progressed to the bedroom with high points along the way. When we were finished, just before pickup time downstairs, I wasn’t sure who had taken advantage of whom, but I felt I should get a certificate or something. I copied down her phone number on my way out.

  Everyone blanked. Barney had been ejected from the high-rise he was working and had put away several beers before we arrived. I don’t think Lanny had hit a door. Still, the mood was upbeat.

  “In 12 hours I’ll be on a plane to Tokyo! Not bad for a door to door salesman.” Lanny was in a really ebullient mood. He was even buying the beer—unprecedented for him.

  “Don’t worry about a thing, Lanny. While you’re gone production will proceed unabated.” Barney was trying to sound like a manager again. I was sure he hadn’t knocked on a single door the whole night. He must have been about half lit. As far as I was concerned, he didn’t deserve to be left in charge, but I kept my mouth shut.

  I still had a key to the office from my field manager days so I let myself in at 9:00 the next morning. There was no ad in the paper and the phone didn’t ring all morning. I took the opportunity to go through Lanny’s file of newspaper ads and selected one that seemed to appeal to guys like myself rather than college students. I wanted guys who had had a taste of dead end jobs and, like me, would be willing to shovel shit for a $100 a week and a future. I sweetened the salary a little, as we had no intention of ever paying a salary anyway, and emphasized travel to make it sound more exotic. I started the ad, “H.S. Grads” in bold type to attract the attention of someone who might not yet be thinking of themselves as a “management trainee.”

  HIGH SCHOOL GRADS: Large Natl. Co. will train inexper. but ambitious young men for mangt. positions. Requires some travel. $120/week to start 355-6602, call 9-12.

  When Barney came in I convinced him we should put the ad in the paper and try to get some kind of sales force going. He was a little reluctant to make a decision.

  “Come on, Barney, you’re in charge. Don’t you think we should try to do something constructive?” I pleaded, wanting to have my own crew working by the time Lanny got back.

  He wasn’t in a very good mood. His order from a few days back had gone down, and he was facing another week without a check.

  “Look, Barney, if you’ll put the ad in I’ll come down here every day and answer the phone and start training class.”

  “OK. You get em in and I’ll give ’em the hiring lecture. You can train if you want.”

  “They go in my crew?”

  “You don’t have a crew. You can be trainer.”

  “Bullshit. I hire ’em, I train ’em, they should be in my crew.”

  “We split anything we hire while Lanny is gone. No guarantees about what happens when he gets back. First one rides with me.” Barney had apparently had this discussion before. I
was to do all the work; he got half the salesmen.

  He groused a bit about the ad but let it go into the paper unchanged.

  The next day there were a dozen calls by ten o’clock. I screened out the duds by telling them the job was filled. Of the remaining six, three insisted they needed to know more details about the job than I was willing to give over the phone and wouldn’t come in for an interview. Three were scheduled for the next morning. I wrote an order that night and kept Barney reasonably sober so he could do the interviews the next day.

  Barney arrived on time and gave an employment interview that far surpassed Lanny’s. By the time he got through talking about the travel opportunities in the international division (military bases) and the advancement opportunities, I was ready to sign again myself. He downplayed the door to door aspect of the job and combined the first and second day interview into one. He had all three guys hired and ready for training in an hour and then was off for lunch like he did this kind of thing all the time.

  I remembered how impressed I was with the businesslike aspect he gave to the office and tried to keep that in my training program. I went through the interview and the first part of the presentation for them to copy down. I made a point of telling them that I had once been a delivery boy and was now a true “manager.”

  “When is pay day?” was the first question any of them asked.

  The inquisitive one was Billy Schatz who was currently frying hamburgers at the Krystal while he and his pregnant wife were living in a flophouse hotel across the street. They had just moved from Minneapolis and were flat broke. He said he was an ex-Marine and looked the part—short and stocky. When he shook hands you had the feeling that the steel in his grip extended all the way up the arm, through his neck, right up into his skull. He was neatly dressed and had very short hair. I didn’t see him smile one time all morning.

  “Your first pay day will be in two weeks, on Thursday,” I said, figuring if they didn’t write an order, they would have seen the light and hit the road by then.