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Self-Made Man

Page 20

by Norah Vincent

Duh.

  “Confident. Competent. Ambitious.”

  “Great,” he said writing these down on my résumé and circling them. “And what are you looking for in your next position?”

  Duh again. “A challenge,” I said.

  Bing. Right answer.

  These were my stock responses, and they were always greeted with the same approving nods.

  The Red Bull jobs all ran on the same formula. If you passed the first interview, you’d go on to the second. This was an all-day observational period during which you tagged along with one of the sales people in the field, watching him work, telling him more about yourself, and getting a feel for the business. If you survived the second interview, you passed on to the third, which was essentially the job offer with a lot of ego-pumping preamble attached to it.

  When you went on these second interviews you realized very quickly why the Red Bull offices were so small and sparsely furnished. Usually they had a reception area, one office with a desk and two chairs, one small conference room, and another small, unfurnished room plastered with motivational posters that said things like WALK IT. TALK IT. DRESS IT. and BE THE BEST. EXPECT THE BEST. in large black letters.

  Nobody but the top one or two people was ever there during the day. They were the managers, and they were constantly conducting interviews. People quit or were fired at such an astounding rate that the managers were forced to renew the stock every week just to keep their rosters filled.

  Other than being a whorish in-’n’-out parlor for conducting interviews, the office was just a place for the salespeople to dump their stuff and powwow at the beginning and end of each eleven-hour day, which they did eagerly and with relish. Psyching yourself up at the beginning of the day, and congratulating yourself profusely for what you’d accomplished at the end of it, was central to the Red Bull attitude. It was the only thing that kept anybody going through the grueling, demoralizing hours in the field.

  The bulk of the eleven-hour days were spent walking door-to-door selling things, whether it was phone service or entertainment books or VIP cards. The entertainment books were filled with coupons for local businesses, and the salespeople sold those by going from house-to-house in the residential areas that surrounded the advertised businesses. The VIP cards offered similar incentives to residents and businesspeople. For the cost of the card (say, seventy-five dollars), a local spa might offer the VIP card holder three “free” visits to its facility.

  That was it. That was the job. Go door-to-door in the hot sun, the pouring rain or drifts of snow, hour after hour, making the same pitch at least fifty times a day to people who were mostly hostile to solicitors. If you didn’t sell, you didn’t eat. You worked on 100 percent commission, and the bosses who sat on their asses in the office got a handsome cut of everything you sold.

  Dano thought he had a live one in me. Educated, articulate, brash and ready. He sent me out for my second interview with a twenty-seven-year-old guy named Ivan, a Hungarian former tennis pro who never made it on the tour. He had an aunt living in this country, so he’d come over, ostensibly to go to college, but had quit midway through and started doing everything under the sun to make a living, including stripping at bachelorette parties and teaching ballroom dancing. He also claimed to have been a bodybuilder for a while, which he said explained why the collar of his dress shirt was at least an inch too big for his neck.

  Ivan wasn’t alone in dressing badly. Though we were walking door-to-door out in the elements, the bosses insisted that we wear suits and ties. Most of the guys on the staff were too hard up to afford a real suit and too tasteless to buy a presentable one. Not a single one of them had the slightest idea how to tie a tie. As a result, they all looked like the epitome of the cheap salesman, rumpled and unctuous without a word in their mouths or a thought in their heads that hadn’t been put there by management.

  Ivan was six feet tall, and did have an athletic build, so I could believe he’d been a stripper if not a bodybuilder. He’d begun to lose his hair early, so he’d decided a few years back to shave his entire head. He had one black Hugo Boss suit that he’d bought back when he was actually making money. He made a point of telling me this and showing me the label. He said sometimes he kept his pen in the breast pocket of his jacket so that when he was trying to make a sale he could flash the client his label. He wore this suit every day, and though it was nicely cut, somehow he managed to make it look saggy and disheveled, partly because it gathered dust on the country dirt roads that we worked in our territory.

  On my first day out with Ivan we gave a ride to a third salesman named Troy who was working part of our territory but didn’t have a car. A lot of these guys didn’t, so they often had to share rides and then get dropped off in the middle of nowhere with a promise that their partners would be back to get them in seven hours. We did this with Troy, and the first time we did it I thought Ivan was joking. We dropped him in his black suit with nothing but his bag of merchandise, or “merch,” as they called it, on an eighty-five-degree humid sunny day at the corner of the highway and a dirt road that led deep into farmland. He’d eaten a convenience store Danish for breakfast and that was the only food he was going to see for the next seven hours.

  As we left Troy, I made a comment about his condition, and Ivan said, “Don’t worry about him. He’ll be fine. He dropped seventeen books once in a trailer park. A trailer park. The guy’s amazing.”

  “How does he stand it?” I asked.

  “He’s from the ghetto,” said Ivan. “This is his only shot to make some real money. He doesn’t have a choice. It’s basically this or McDonald’s, and at least here he has a chance at advancement.”

  That was the truth of the Red Bull jobs. Anybody who stuck it out in them was desperate. They clung to the hope that they, too, might get promoted to management if only they worked hard enough. It was certainly possible, but you’d have to put yourself through ten-, eleven-and twelve-hour humiliating days, six days a week even to have a shot at assistant management.

  “He’s one of our best salesmen. He’s got some unorthodox sales techniques.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you couldn’t do it out here, because a lot of these people are totally racist [Troy was black], but in another territory we worked, a rich, liberal white territory, he did some crazy shit. One time, when I was out with him, a little kid answered the door, and Troy said, ‘Go tell your mommy there’s a nigger at the door.’ So the kid went back into the house and you could hear him shouting ‘Mom, there’s a nigger at the door.’ When the lady came to the door she was mortified, and she said, ‘Oh my God, I am so, so sorry.’ And Troy just said, ‘Oh, it’s okay. Here’s what you do. I’ve got these great entertainment books that we’re selling for a good cause…’ And he launched right into his pitch, and she bought two books on the spot. Can you believe that shit?”

  Actually, before long on the job I could. These guys were justified in doing just about anything to sell their merch, as far as I was concerned. They worked hard enough for it.

  Clutch Advertising had a sales force of about twenty-five people, only four of whom were women, and although all three of the Red Bull companies I worked for were male dominated and ran on what you might politely call a masculine vibe, Clutch was especially macho. And while in certain respects Ivan was a fish out of water in this environment—being a foreigner, he was better educated, more cultured and spoke better English than the rest of the staff—he was in other respects a perfect fit. Like him, a lot of the people who excelled at the Red Bull companies had played competitive sports. Davis, the second in command at Clutch, had been a college basketball big shot who had never made it to the pros.

  These guys all thought and spoke like coaches and star players. They had that single-minded combative edge that had always disqualified me from ever taking sports seriously. Being the best, beating the other guy, selling more, scoring higher, fucking better-looking women. Those were the only things that matter
ed to them in life, and they mattered a lot. Selling, for them, was just another form of scoring or ranking or winning, and the office reflected this attitude in every respect. It was a musky men’s locker room environment.

  Every morning and every evening when the sales force gathered in the unfurnished room, there was rap music or some cock rock band like AC/DC blaring on the boom box. On my first morning at Borg Consulting, another Red Bull company at which I was employed for a short time, I was especially dismayed to hear the rap song “OPP” (which stands for Other People’s Pussy) blasting at seven-thirty a.m. None of the women on staff seemed bothered in the least by the anthem or its purported implications.

  Ivan, too, was a big one for rap music. It was part of how he’d learned American slang, and he found it endlessly amusing to recite lyrical snippets he’d heard on the radio, especially the misogynistic ones. He was always blurting them impromptu and laughing at himself while flooring it down the dirt roads of our territory in his beat-up old uninsured, unregistered 1989 Ford Escort. Kicking up swarms of dust and shimmying the car sideways on the loose-pebbled roads was one way to relieve the tedium of the long afternoons. He especially loved the term “cluster fuck,” which he often said at random moments for effect, because in his thick accent, I had to admit, it had a certain humorous onomatopoeic quality about it.

  Like every other guy in the Red Bull companies, Ivan saw his job as an extension of his dick. His masculinity depended on his ability to perform, and every sale was like a seduction, like a pickup in a bar. It was, as the gurus always said, about taking control of the situation. Behind every door was a sale if you had the balls to make it. It was as simple as that. Everything about the business was sexual or an extension of male sexuality—conquest, confidence, capability. Making the sale was like getting the panties, and losing it was taking it up the ass. There was no middle ground. There were no excuses. Just fortune or failure.

  Ivan talked about sex almost constantly, which wasn’t hard to do when every sale or lost sale was a sexual metaphor. When we lost a sale, Ivan took it personally and usually had to make it up to his ego in some way. He would say, “You know, some guys can take that and not do anything. But I can’t. I gotta have my own back if somebody gets in my face.” On the job, though, he usually knew enough to keep it to himself, so often he’d save his “own back” for a malicious comment in the car. It seemed to relieve his mind.

  One time we stopped at a guy’s house, got out of the car and made it only halfway up the driveway before the guy said, “This is private property and you’re not invited.”

  When we got back in the car Ivan hissed, “That guy probably chokes his wife and fucks her in the ass.”

  Then he cackled and went on to tell me about a woman he claimed to have picked up in a bar. He said that when they got back to her place and sat down with a drink she said, “Don’t tell me when you’re going to do it, but when you’re ready to, just push me up against the wall, choke me and fuck me in the ass, raw.”

  That was when I realized how completely full of shit Ivan was. But then that’s what made him such a good salesman. And he was a damned good salesman. He could sell to anyone. Once when we were out together he sold a coupon book to a woman who was walking her dog by the side of the road. He didn’t even get out of the car. He just leaned out of the window and pitched her right there. It was amazing how congenial and sincere he could sound without seeming slimy in the least.

  But then, slimy or not, some people just wouldn’t give you an inch. One guy who had a guard dog that circled the car as we pulled up to the house, told us to get lost right away. “Don’t even get out of the car,” he said. This set Ivan going.

  “Motherfucker,” he said. “Call that dog over here.”

  He whistled to the dog as he turned the car around in the driveway. He sucked a wad of snot down from his nose into his throat as he tried to get the dog to come by his door, but the dog wouldn’t come close enough. Ivan spit toward him but missed, saying, “When guys are like that, I like to spit on their dogs, a nice big loogie right in the face. It really pisses them off.”

  That was the scummiest side of Ivan, and in the car with me he let it out full blast in a hail of vitriol that never seemed to let up. He had an answer for everything.

  After he told me the raw story I said, “Ivan, how many women have you slept with?”

  “Seventy-four,” he said without hesitation.

  Again, probably a giant lie, but who knew?

  Ivan also claimed to have an IQ of 180 and a nine-inch dick. But don’t they all, at least to each other.

  I asked him about what he liked in a woman and he said something that confirmed with startling precision what I’d heard from other men and had myself surmised from my experiences in the strip clubs.

  “It’s probably from watching a lot of porn when I was a kid,” he said, “but I expect the pussy to be odorless and tasteless.”

  Just like a doll, I thought. Just like a plastic Barbie doll. Nothing you’d ever find in nature.

  On our way back to the office that night—our time in the field finished at eight p.m.—we talked this subject over with Troy. He said, “I’m fine with the pussy so long as it tastes like pussy. If it’s skanky then we have a problem.”

  Then he launched into a speech about how he could have any one of the women at the office if he wanted her. No one challenged him on this. It was like the IQ, big-dick thing. You didn’t mess with a man’s line. It was just part of the gig. When he was done telling us about what a lady-killer he was, Troy said he had a joke for us.

  “Why does the blonde have a bald pussy?” he asked.

  “Why?” Ivan and I said in unison.

  “Ever seen grass on a highway?” said Troy.

  Each day in the field ended with another gathering back at the office for settle-ups. To settle-up with management, you logged the number of entertainment books (or applications, or VIP cards) you had sold for the day, took your cut of the proceeds, and gave the rest to the bosses. At Clutch each set of entertainment books (we sold them in sets of two) cost $40, $13 of which went to the salesman, $10 to the direct manager, and the rest to upper management and various clients for whom the books were also making money. So, if on a given day you sold six sets of books, you made a total of $240, $78 of which went directly into your pocket that very evening in the form of cold, hard cash. The other $162 went out the window and up the stairs.

  Selling six sets was a respectable day’s work. Selling ten was mighty fine, and for this privilege you got to ring the cast-metal bell, which was kept at the front of the rumpus room for end-of-day celebrations. When you rang the bell, you got high fives and congratulations all around from the managers and the rest of the sales force. Congratulations usually came in the form of a Red Bull acronym—JUICE, which stood for Join Us In Creating Excitement. Everything good was JUICE, and every accomplishment was “JUICE by this” or “JUICE by that.” If you rang the bell you were greeted with a chorus of “JUICE by Ned, JUICE by Ned.” As I said, it was like being in a men’s locker room postgame.

  So even on a very, very good day—selling ten sets of books took a lot of hustle and didn’t happen very often—you’d only make $130, and when you spread that over the eleven-hour day, you were only making $11.81 an hour pretax. On an average day when you sold maybe five books, you made $65. That made an hourly wage of $5.90, just barely above minimum wage, and that without benefits of any kind. You were employed as an independent contractor, which meant that you were expected to pay your own quarterly taxes. It also meant that the company didn’t officially employ you, which in turn meant that they didn’t have to pay you an hourly minimum wage, or offer you medical benefits or paid vacation. In short, you were a legal slave, hoping upon hope one day to earn your forty acres and a mule.

  At the end of my first day, which was technically only my second interview, Ivan gave me a stellar recommendation, and Davis and Dano offered me a job on the spot. They want
ed to know if I could start work the next day. The next day was Saturday, a normal workday at Clutch. I said I could. They were having an interoffice sales conference in the morning, and I didn’t want to miss that show.

  Dano was a savvy slave driver. He knew that in order to keep his crew making money for him, he had to motivate them enough to take the initiative but play on their insecurities enough to control them. To accomplish this he used a double technique. Push them from one end by exacerbating their greed and desperation to acquire the almighty dollar and the lifestyle that comes with it, and at the same time pull them from the other end by threatening their already piss-poor self-esteem. So, he would imply, if you succeed at this you’ll be one of the big guys. You’ll have everything that I have. If you fail, you’ll be a quitter, a nobody, a loser. It was a very effective combination. Every morning he or Davis would give a speech on this order, publicly rewarding the high rollers from the previous day, and solidly rebuking the sore losers. That’s what morning office culture was all about, keeping people’s heads above water and kicking them in the ass so that they would go out for one more egregious day and trudge the territory with sloppy, gleaming grins on their faces.

  Saturday was a special gathering of all the Clutch sales folk in the metropolitan area, probably about a hundred people in all, only 10 percent of whom were women. Ten percent at the most. We met at nine a.m. in a warehouse in a suburb near our office. For the first hour Ivan and I mingled with the rest of the reps. Ivan introduced me around as the new guy, and I got a lot of welcoming slaps on the shoulder and hearty handshakes from droves of execrably clad men. Every one of them looked like the black sheep son of some family, resentfully cleaned up for church because their dads had dragged them there under penalty of grounding. Most of them wore button-down shirts and ties, and some form of khakis, a nod to management dress codes, but every garment looked as if it had been slept in.

  Whispering in my ear, Ivan gave me the lay of the land. He pointed at a pudgy middle-aged black guy in a suit, one of the very few older guys in the company. He had a thin, carefully trimmed, graying mustache, which, as Ivan told it, the other reps had long been telling him to shave.

 

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