Self-Made Man (27 page)

After I'd made two sales in a row I felt high. I'd broken the curse. I was on a roll. I'd stopped asking for the sale like a girl and started taking it like a man. I'd seduced two people and I could do it again. What's more, I didn't need the bosses' pitch. I could make up my own, and it would sound better and more spontaneous than anything the dolts at Clutch could devise. People knew bad bullshit when they heard it. Good bullshit was what I needed.

That was the chain of thought, and the chain of thought became an act, a performance, a man's performance supplanting a woman's: confidence, competence, control—not my former supplication, apology and need. Success lifted my spirits. Good spirits got my juices flowing, and my juices wrote their own evil script. I got creative, and creativity, however seedy and low it may be, is something that very few people see coming. I had learned as much from Ivan.

At the third house I bounded out of the car and across the lawn toward a woman who was working outside in her garden. I was in a good mood and she could tell. My smile was genuine, and she responded to it warmly.

“How ya doin'?” I asked.

“Not bad,” she said. “How are you?”

This was a miracle already. None of my other greetings had evoked courtesy. Everyone else had cut through my crap right away: “What do you want?” or “What are you selling?” I had managed somehow to finesse those snags at the previous two houses and make the sale anyway, but now I didn't need to. This woman was relaxed. She was taking my lead. We were standing there like two people without agendas who had all the time in the world.

I asked her about her garden. She had an accent, so I asked her where she was from. It turned out that she was English, so I told her about having grown up there myself. We talked about this for a few more minutes, as she went back to her planting, kneeling in front of one of her flowerbeds and scooping the soil with a trowel. Finally, when there was a lull, she nodded at the coupon books in my hand and said, very politely, “So what do you have there?”

I looked down at them as if I'd forgotten they were there.

“Oh, well, I'm out here doing some market research,” I said, “and these are the prototypes. I'm trying to get a sense of what people think of them. Can I show you a copy and maybe you'd give me your opinion?”

This was completely untrue, of course, but it would ease her into the pitch, which I planned to give at the end of our conversation, not the beginning. I had learned this lesson from my previous flops. When I made the pitch up front, most people put up a wall and denied me the sale before I'd even gotten a chance to show them the product. I'd learned this as a single guy, too. The in-your-face pitch was the salesman's equivalent of accosting a woman in a bar with a ten-ton come-on, and leading the charge with a cheesy pickup line. You'd be dead before you reached the end of your sentence. So, I reasoned, if I took the sale out of the equation at first and simply asked the customer for her opinion, she would let down her guard.

And I was right. She did.

“Sure, what is it?” she said.

I leaned over and leafed through the coupons, pointing out the best ones and asserting that the book, if used properly, would make up its forty-dollar value many times over. That part was true. The books actually were a good deal, but when you pitched like a wimp or a teleprompted Clutchhead, you'd never get the chance to point this out to anyone. On the other hand, I thought, if you did get the chance to point it out, people would be hard-pressed to deny it.

Once again I was right.

“So,” I said, “what do you think? Is it a good value?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It looks like it.”

And there it was. Done. I was in control. I had her right where I wanted her. She'd admitted that the product was desirable. Now if I offered to sell it to her, she would, by her own admission, be passing up a deal if she didn't buy it.

“All right,” I said. “Well, here's the thing. We'd really like people to try the books out, to see how they work, and maybe give us pointers on how to improve them. So we're offering these few prototypes for sale. Do you think you'd be interested in trying one out for us and letting us know what you think?”

And whaddya know, she would. She did. Out came the checkbook, and down in manly glory went another Ned score. Slam-dunk.

“Dude,” said Ivan. “You're the man.”

And for a few degraded hours I guess I was, God help me.

At the end of the day I gave my earned cash to Ivan. I didn't want anything to do with it. Besides, he needed it more than I did, and when it came to selling the male mystique, he had taught me practically everything I knew.

It's a little frightening, actually, how often I've thought back on those days with Ivan, heard those words “take control” or “show your balls” echoing in my mind in my everyday life as a woman. They are not idle words. They work. They work in a lot of situations that might otherwise control a person. They are Ned's lingering voice taking over, almost like an alternate personality getting the job done when I can't. They linger irritatingly, like Muzak heard at the supermarket, and they remind me that perhaps the strongest remaining male advantage is purely mental. Thinking makes it so.

 

The next morning Davis gave me the full star treatment in the morning rap session.

“I got a guy…a highly motivated type a guy…Mr. Ned Vincent. Yesterday he went out with Ivan and dropped seven times, put more than ninety dollars in his pocket. JUICE by that.”

“JUICE,” yelled the reps amid a round of applause.

I had been coached for this moment. Davis had told me what to say on cue when he singled me out for the high-roller speech. I was to credit my success to the system, working the system, working the so-called law of averages, which, according to company definitions, meant that one out of every ten people would buy the product pretty much no matter what you said to them—the idea being that if you pitched a hundred people in a day you were bound to sell ten books just by default. Whipping yourself on to the next house, house after house, was called working the law of averages. Sooner or later you'd make the sale. Telling the other reps that working the law of averages had worked for you on a big day was central to sustaining morale. Telling the truth, that is, saying that you had sold as many books as you had because you'd just gotten better and better at lying as the day wore on, wasn't company policy. It didn't engender office pride, even though, of course, learning to lie better was what everyone who did well was really doing. Not that the law of averages didn't work. It had to at some point. But very few of the people who sold ten books on any given day had really visited a hundred people. They cut corners, and those corners were the hard facts, rounded into S curves by the end of a good day's work.

I said what I was supposed to say, and everyone duly patted me on the back and high-fived me until my palms were stinging and I wanted to garrote Ned with his own tie. Doug, the ex-marine who was usually the high roller, approached me suspiciously that morning, wondering if I was onto his secrets.

“Good job, man. What was working for you?”

He was wearing a shapeless powder blue suit with a white windowpane check.

“I made people think that I was giving them something, rather than taking something from them,” I answered.

He was stopped by this for a second, as if I'd quoted him a price in a foreign currency. You could see the calculation pass over his face and then the flicker of recognition. He'd decided that this was a useful remark even though you could tell he didn't quite know what it meant. He socked it away in his little ferret brain for future use, probably in some seminar he'd be giving before long at a Sheraton in Cleveland.

He changed the subject, fixing me with his opaque eyes.

“Yo, man, I'm taking you out today, and we're gonna be on the golf course by four o'clock.”

The bosses were behind this, I suspected, wooing me through him because they couldn't be bothered. He was going to show me the life of a high roller, the fruits of the promised income in the form of a niblick and a cigar.

I couldn't face this prospect, striding the fairways with this slate-eyed scrapper telling me his boot camp stories and correcting my swing.

But the day didn't go as expected. We stopped for gas on the way to our territory, and he tried to push off a few books while we were there, pitching other people who were filling their tanks.

Nobody bought.

We weren't going to make it home before ten at this rate, let alone to the golf course, unless we sold to every soused rake and divorcé in the clubhouse. I couldn't face that, either.

In the car Doug told me stories about his time in the field, all of them again about sex. He said he'd walked up to a house once and heard a couple fighting loudly inside. He could hear it all the way up the walk. “You fucking bitch” this and “you fucking cunt” that. When he rang the doorbell, the door flew open right away and the lady of the house was standing there naked. The husband was in the background near the stairs watching Doug look at his wife, or as Doug told it, watching him try not to look at his wife. Doug made his pitch looking down at the floor or directly into the woman's eyes.

“She's pretty good looking, isn't she?” the guy said to Doug.

“Sir,” said Doug, “I really wasn't looking.”

This was classic territorial guy stuff, like the men on the street who didn't look into my eyes when they thought I was a guy. You didn't look another man in the eyes and you didn't look too long at his woman. You looked long enough to register your envy in his eyes maybe, but no longer. A guy wanted to know that you thought his woman was hot, and even that you wanted her, but more than that would cross the line and you'd be in trouble. Doug knew this instinctively, as any guy would.

By this time Doug had already made whatever panicked pitch he was going to make. The woman had reached for her checkbook, mostly out of spite, Doug figured—piss off her husband with a needless purchase. As she bent over to write the check on the hall table, the guy smacked her on the ass and looked at Doug.

“She likes that—don't you?” he said.

Of course, all of this was probably a lie, just more guy talk. Projected fantasy. What door-to-door salesman doesn't want to find a naked lady at home?

At around noon Doug pulled into a brand-new subdivision nestled into a crook of land behind the major thoroughfare. He was clearly poaching on another rep's territory, but that was one of his shortcuts. He'd buy his own books (even at a loss sometimes, I suspected), poach, whatever it took to better himself in the bosses' eyes and get to assistant management. It was all he had to live for. Money was all that seemed to matter to him, and without a college education or any prospect of one, self-made schemes like this one were his only road to riches. He swallowed everything Dano said. Without cash there would be no house, no boat, no hot wife, no kids, no sense of himself as a provider and therefore no sense of himself as a man.

Once he'd parked curbside, Doug told me to circle around the houses counterclockwise. He would go the other way, and we'd meet in the middle. I started on my route, but we were mostly making “no home” lists—writing down the numbers of all the houses where no one was home, so that we could circle back that evening around cocktail hour and maybe clean up. I did about ten houses and only two people were home, neither of whom was interested in coupons.

It was a sweltering day. My beard was melting on my face and I was wearing a big sweathole in the back of my shirt under my blazer. After the tenth house I gave up and sat at the end of someone's driveway in the shade of a baby tree—the sub was so new it barely had sod—a surreal touch that lent an extra dose of existential despair to the whole proceeding; as if this wasn't earth at all and you were dead and didn't know it and the afterlife was this hellish little plod around suburbia for all eternity. I waited for Doug, who had gone all the way to the end of the serpentine culde-sac, to make his way back into sight. Hanging out under a tree was something I'm sure a lot of the salesmen did on certain days. Ivan had said sometimes he just sat in his car by the side of a deserted road and smoked cigarettes, hiding from the heat and humiliation. It was enough to make anyone as bitter as he was, and I could see how some of the older reps who were trying to support families on this work would sit there consumed by self-loathing and impotence.

Doug came back after about an hour or so, having dropped only one book in that time. He'd lost face in front of the new guy. The shine of the morning had worn off him. His pestering sparkle was gone and his eyes were a little fiercer than before, almost substantive, with a pinprick of resentment at their centers.

I wondered, given all the potency metaphors and bravado that the male salesmen brought to the turf, whether accepting this kind of defeat wasn't easier for a woman. Winning or conquering wasn't part of our cultural definition. It wasn't tied to our genitals. There was a residual sexism in this for women, a benign twist on being thought useless in the world of work for so many centuries. If we did it people would say, “pretty good for a girl,” and if we failed we were still commended for trying. But a guy, he was a useless clod if he couldn't perform, and he said that to himself at least as harshly as anyone else did. Sitting under a tree in the middle of a workday, glooming over the little or nothing you had to show for yourself, was about as emasculating as it got.