“Wear loose-fitting shoes and don’t get too close to the door so you don’t get your nose broke when they slam the door in your face,” said Margie, as she turned and walked into room 452, slamming the door in my face.
I went back to Ronnie’s apartment and told him I had a job.
“Doing what?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I had to say, “but can I borrow your Weejuns to wear to work in the morning? Mine aren’t broken in yet.”
Dipstick’s (Zorro’s) name turned out to be Howard Barnes. He was one mean son of a bitch in the afternoon. At seven in the morning, he was Hitler with a hangover.
The next day at 7:00 A.M., four budding encyclopedia salesmen stood in front of Hitler. Two of the guys looked older than I was. They were probably in their early thirties. One continuously sniffed on a Vick’s inhaler. Another one wore a short-sleeved shirt and had a tattoo of a rather sinister-looking snake on his left forearm. I didn’t know much about the exciting field of sales at that point, but I did know having a tattoo of a snake on your arm probably wouldn’t help in winning the confidence of a potential customer.
The other guy looked to be about my age, or a year or two older. He was quite skinny, and his hair was in a state of complete anarchy. It looked like a clump of palm trees just after a hurricane hit.
The tiny office was hot and filled with Chesterfield smoke. Howard sat behind his desk and looked us over, much as a person would look over a plate of fried rat.
“I’ll be surprised if this goddamn group can sell one goddamn encyclopedia,” Harold began.
His eyes stopped at Kudzu Head.
“What’n hell’s your name?” he asked the kid.
“Larry,” the kid answered.
“What the hell kind of hair is that, Larry?” Howard asked in a manner that made it quite clear he didn’t like the name Larry or anybody named Larry.
“Just my hair,” said Larry.
“I’ve seen better-looking hair than that on fatback,” Howard sneered, despite the fact Larry bore no resemblance to John Cameron Swayze.
“Awright,” he said next, “everybody downstairs and into the van.”
I entered the exciting field of sales for the first and last time at approximately 8:30 A.M. in Pinewood Hills, a subdivision in suburban Atlanta. I was wearing the only suit I owned, a blue one. I wore a red-and-white striped tie and a white shirt, oxford cloth with buttondown collars, neither one of which was frayed, and Ronnie’s loose-fitting Weejuns.
I carried my sales kit, which was nothing more than a folded poster that showed a picture of Howard’s encyclopedias, and about a dozen order blanks.
Howard had given us precious little instruction. In fact, upon letting me out of the van at the entrance to Pinewood Hills subdivision, all he had said was, “I’ll meet you back here at five.”
There I stood.
Pinewood Hills looked to be an upper-middle-class neighborhood. The houses didn’t appear to be over five or six years old. They were mostly ranch, with covered garages sitting on half-acre lots. The lawns were neat. I noticed swing sets in a few of the backyards. My keen sales instincts said to me that meant there were children to go with them, and what better educational tool was there than a set of encyclopedias?
I opened my poster. There were fourteen volumes in each set of encyclopedias, according to the picture. A set cost $189.99. The deal was, you could pay 10 percent down and pay the rest upon delivery of the encyclopedias. If you paid up front, however, you would receive 10 percent off. Howard said we could take checks. “The piss-ants probably don’t have that much cash laying around the house,” he had explained.
I decided to work from right to left. I’d start at the first house on the right, then cross over to the first house on my left. A salesman needs a plan.
A plan. I hadn’t thought of that. I was a salesman without a sales pitch. You didn’t just walk up to a body’s front door and say, “Want to buy a set of encyclopedias?”
That certainly hadn’t worked for the guy who sold toothbrushes on the sidewalk. People would walk by, and he would ask, “Want to buy a toothbrush?”
He never sold a one. But then he got a plan. He made some cookies and put dog do-do in them. When people would walk by, he would say, “How about a free cookie?”
People would bite into the cookie and then spit it out. “This cookie,” they would exclaim, “tastes like dog do-do!” At which point the salesman would say, “That’s what it’s made out of. Want to buy a toothbrush?”
I decided to go with the old “I’m-working-my-way-through-college” routine. I would knock on a door, and when someone opened it, I would say:
“Hello. My name is Lewis Grizzard, and I am working my way through college. I’m selling encyclopedias, and I was wondering if perhaps you would be interested in buying a set.”
The person at the door would say, “Well, Timmy’s about to start school, and maybe a set of encyclopedias would really be a help to him. Won’t you come on in? Would you like some coffee before we start?”
I would say, “Yes, please, Cream only. What a nice house you have, Mrs. . . .”
“Carpenter. Mrs. Carpenter. How about a doughnut with your coffee?”
“That would be nice, Mrs. Carpenter,” I would say, and that would be all there was to it. Just that, I’d have my first sale on my way to earning as much as $125 per week.
Nobody came to the door at the first house. At the second, a small child answered.
I asked, “Is your mother home?”
The small child turned around and screamed, “Mommy! There’s a man at the door!”
And Mommy screamed back, “What does he want?”
The kid said to me, “What do you want?”
“I’m selling encyclopedias.”
The kid turned around and screamed again, “He’s selling plysopdias!”
And Mommy screamed back, “Tell him we don’t want any.”
“We don’t want any,” the kid said to me, and slammed the door in my face.
At the third house, a woman came to the door with curlers in her hair. She wore a bathrobe and a pair of fuzzy slippers.
Having been married to three women who were devoted to wearing curlers in their hair and fuzzy shoes on their feet, I have, over the years, put a great deal of thought into this uniquely female getup. My conclusions—remember that I am still concluding, which happens a lot when a man considers various behavioral patterns of women—is that they put curlers in their hair not to curl their hair but to pick up radio stations without having to turn on a radio.
My scientific knowledge is somewhat limited, but I know my ex-wives often had enough metal in their hair to pick up radio stations as far away as Del Rio, Texas. When they picked up rock stations, you actually could see their curlers moving to the raucous beat of the music. Thus, the term “hair-raising music.”
Their curlers were the early runners to the Walkman, and I have further concluded that one of the reasons women say strange things while their hair is up in curlers is they are trying to think at the same time radio waves are bombarding their brains. This causes such utterances as, “You don’t love me and it’s fifty-five on the Southside” and “Why don’t we ever talk anymore? Hi, I’m Casey Kasem.”
As for fuzzy shoes, that’s simple. Women wear fuzzy shoes to keep their feet warm. Women’s feet are always cold. It’s a simple fact of nature, or a quirk of anatomy. Women’s feet are always cold, their bladders are the size of a White Acre pea, and they can hear whispers at three hundred paces if they figure the whisper involves another woman or a piece of gossip. (And, yes, I realize this entire parenthetical exercise is overtly sexist in nature. Recall, however, the time frame in which I am currently writing is 1964, before sexism was invented by a group of women wearing hair curlers and receiving some liberal talk-show blather from public radio.)
I started my sales pitch. The woman interrupted me and said, with an accompanying snarl, “I don’t care who yo
u are and what you’re selling!”
The force of the door slamming to in my face must have jolted Richter scales. There is nothing quite as belittling, I was beginning to understand, as a door being slammed in your face. It said volumes, which could be condensed down to such few words as: “Get the hell away from me, you creep.”
I lasted in the exciting field of sales until eleven that morning. I didn’t sell a single set of encyclopedias. I was allowed in only two houses.
In one, a small poodle dog kept yapping throughout my entire sales pitch. When I finally had finished giving it, the would-be customer, a lady in her sixties, said, “Sorry, but Mr. Binghampton and I don’t read very much.”
At the second house, before I even introduced myself and stated my purpose, a lady said, “Come on in, the set’s in the den.”
She thought I was the television repairman she had called. Do television repairman wear ties on house calls? I wondered. When I told the woman I wasn’t the television repairman but a salesman of encyclopedias, she said, “I don’t want any encyclopedias. I want my television fixed. Do you know anything about televisions?”
I said that I didn’t.
She showed me the door.
I walked out of the subdivision and found a bus stop. When the bus came, I left my sales kit on the sidewalk, got on the bus, and retired.
I would often wonder later what ever became of Howard Barnes.
Many years later, there would appear on television sets across the country a left-handed guitar player/singer/yodeler named Slim Whitman. He would have a pencil-thin mustache and would appear somewhat shiftless. All I’m saying is if Slim Whitman doesn’t look like an ex-used car/encyclopedia salesman, a 1957 Plymouth will start on the first try on a cold morning in February.
The morning after my early retirement from sales, jobless again, I drove back to downtown Atlanta, parked at Union Station again, and got into banking in a matter of hours. I headed down Marietta Street and came to the First National Bank. Why not? I walked inside and located the personnel department.
“I’m Lewis Grizzard,” I said, leaving out the part about my future in journalism, “and I was wondering if you have any job openings.”
A woman, pleasant for a change, handed me an application. I filled it out, gave it back to her, and then she said, “I must ask you to take our standard test.”
Test? That concerned me. What sort of test would I have to take? A test about banking? All I really knew about banking was, the pens were always missing when you went into a bank to cash a check or fill out a deposit slip.
Although most banks went to the trouble of attaching their pens to their desks with little chains, the pens still were always missing, which concerned me greatly. How can an institution be trusted to watch over my money when it couldn’t even keep people from stealing its pens in broad daylight?
The woman handed me the test and directed me to a small room. Inside the room was one chair and one desk.
“Complete the test and bring it back to me,” said the woman.
I went into the room and sat down in the chair. Then I realized I didn’t have a pen. There wasn’t one on the desk, either. I was certain someone had stolen it.
I walked back outside and asked the woman, “Do you have a pen?”
“I’ve got one here somewhere,” she said, beginning a search of the top of her desk. Failing there, she began to pull out desk drawers. She didn’t find a pen there, either. Finally, she went to her purse. No pen.
“Let me ask Mr. Gleegenhammer, the personnel director, if he has one,” she said.
A few minutes later, the woman returned with a pen.
“It’s the only one Mr. Gleegenhammer has,” she informed me. “Be certain to return it when you’re finished with your test.”
I thought to myself, If I really wanted to make a lot of money in my life, what I would do is sell pens to banks.
Instantly recalling my previous experience in the exciting field of sales, however, I took the pen and went to work on the test.
It was a pretty easy test. On the left side of the test, I found a number. Let’s say the number was 314. On the right, I found five numbers. Let’s say they were, 11, 478, 6, 925, 314, and 9. The idea was to circle the number in the right series of numbers that was the same as the one on the left.
My test score was perfect. Why had I wasted my time studying algebra? I could have aced the test with the mathematical knowledge I received playing with my counting blocks when I was four.
“You did quite well on your test,” the woman said. (You mean people come in here who don’t?) “Mr. Gleegenhammer will see you now.”
“Give me my pen back,” said Mr. Gleegenhammer as soon as I had sat down in the chair in front of his desk. The next thing he said was, “We currently have an opening in our loan-payment department. It pays sixty dollars a week.”
“Hmm,” I said to myself. “Banking apparently doesn’t pay as well as the exciting field of sales.” But banking also didn’t involve hoofing it around some neighborhood getting doors slammed in your face.
“I’ll take it,” I told Mr. Gleegenhammer.
“Fine,” he replied, “Report to the loan-payment department in the morning at eight and see Mr. Killingsworth.”
I thought about asking, “What will I be doing in the loan-payment department?” but it wouldn’t have mattered. It was obviously inside work with no heavy lifting involved, and if that idiot test was an example of the mental prowess it would take to work in the loanpayment department, I figured by eight-thirty the next morning I’d be able to perform any task put before me. I might even make vice president. Mr. Gleegenhammer hadn’t asked if I had wanted temporary or permanent employment, so I hadn’t volunteered such information. A couple of weeks before classes started at Georgia, I’d simply announce I had been thinking it over, that banking just wasn’t my pot of glue, and that I had decided to go to college and study journalism. What could they do to me? Put something bad on my permanent record? Ronnie Jenkins had been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom about a thousand times, and that fact had been put on his permanent record, but Ronnie had got a job at a bank, too, so banks apparently had very little interest in permanent records.
I’ll get my duties in the loan-payment department over in a hurry: Customers who borrowed money from the First National Bank of Atlanta—and I would find there were many such people—received loan-payment books, made up of computer cards.
You know these cards. Do not fold, staple, or mutilate these cards. There is a reason the bank doesn’t want you to do that. I’ll get to why later.
Each loan-payment card had the amount of the monthly installment printed on it. The idea was for customers to send in their loan-payment cards with a check for the exact amount shown on the card. Me and a guy named Harvey, who had zits and a beard made up of three hairs, would open the envelopes with the cards and checks inside them. We would put the checks into one pile and the cards in the other. We would make several stacks, called “runs,” of checks and cards.
We would then add each stack of checks on an adding machine. We would do the same with the cards. In a perfect world, the total of the checks would be the exact total of the cards.
But this is an imperfect world, and that is what made working in the loan-payment department of the First National Bank of Atlanta a frustrating experience.
Dingbat customers, whom I came to hate, would have a payment of, say, $19.99 per month. And they would say to themselves, “I’ll make it easy for Lewis and Harvey down at the bank and make my check out for an even twenty.”
So I would add the stack of checks, and it would be one cent more than the total of the corresponding cards, and it would take me hours to go back through the stack and find the check and card that didn’t match.
After finally getting a balance of checks and cards, I then had to carry all the cards to a machine on another floor. The machine, which was the first computer I ever saw (and not much of
one, I suppose, compared to those of today) would add the total of the cards again, serving as a backup for the total Harvey and I had got earlier on the adding machine.
Why we didn’t put the cards in the computer in the first place is something I never found out. I asked Mr. Killingsworth, a sour little man, about it one day, and he explained, “I don’t know.”
Anyway, now we come to do not fold, staple, or mutilate your loan-payment card. If a card had a staple in it, the card with the staple would upset the computer, which would begin eating all the cards. If the card was folded or otherwise mutilated, it would also upset the computer, which would begin eating all the cards. What I would be left with was a lot of loan-payment cards torn to shreds, which meant I had to go back upstairs and punch out new cards, which was a helluva lot of trouble.
I had a couple of other jobs before this one. I sacked groceries for one dollar an hour. I worked with one of those companies that put up shell homes—“a dollar and a deed is all you need.” I scraped paint off windows and helped two guys named Marcus and Willie dig up stumps in the yards. I got five dollars a day for that.
None of those jobs was very much fun, but I never came to hate them the way I came to hate my job at the First National Bank, dealing with dingbats and chewed-up loan-payment cards.
On top of everything I’ve mentioned so far, there was the matter of the organization chart, which was on the wall in the loan-payment department for everybody to see.
Mr. Killingsworth was on top of the chart. Next came his assistants, and so on. On the very bottom of the chart was my name alongside Harvey’s. It’s one thing to know you are scum and dirt and whale dung, but it is quite another to have to look at it and have others see it on a big chart—every single day.
What retained my sanity for me, of course, was the fact that come September, I was gone. I would tell Mr. Killingsworth what he could do with his checks and stapled payment cards and I would be out of there, leaving the others to torment and doom.
What else helped was that life outside the office was wonderful. Ronnie and I hadn’t been mugged in the neighborhood, Paula and I had graduated into another level of romance. And we had found a place to buy beer where they didn’t check your ID.
If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I'm Gonna Nail My Feet to the Ground Page 7
