Self-Made Man (24 page)

People bought his act. They thought he had the right stuff, the kind of stuff they could enslave and perfect in their image and send out into the world to make them more money. They thought—as one coworker who was tight with the bosses later told me—that Ned had upper management written all over him.

The interviewers were always the same: slick, young, whistling voids of painted-on work ethic, all of them going word for word by the company script.

“Ned,” they always said, “this is a real departure for you. What got you interested in this position?”

“Well,” I'd say, “I rose to the top of my field in three years and I get bored very easily. If I conquer something I just want to go on to the next thing.”

The fact that this came out of my mouth, and no one laughed in my face, is a testament to how far trash talk can get you in image projection, especially when you're male. If I'd said this as a woman, especially the way I said it as Ned, that is, with my dick in my teeth, I can pretty well guarantee that the scrotum of the little boss man who happened to be interviewing me that day would have tightened in terror, crippling his sperm's motility for weeks. Clearly Dano, the gatekeeper and BMOC at Clutch Advertising, the guy with the superenlarged still of the black besuited gangsters from
Reservoir Dogs
hanging over his desk, was looking for certain answers. When Ned said his wildly exaggerated piece, he was the man. He was Dano's kind of guy.

“Wow,” Dano said. “Okay, so give me two or three qualities that best describe you, Ned.”

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 mattered 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.