Killer Instinct (8 page)

The plan wasn’t for her to live in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot Colonial in the low-income part of Belmont.

“Listen, Kate,” I finally said after a moment of silence. “I’ve got an interview with Gordy this morning.”

Her face lit up. I hadn’t seen her smile like that in weeks. “Already? Oh, Jason. This is so great.”

“I think Trevor has it sewed up, though.”

“Jason, that’s just negative thinking.”

“Realistic thinking. Trevor’s been campaigning for it. He’s been having his direct reports call Gordy and tell him how much they want Trevor to get the job.”

“But Gordy must see through all that.”

“Maybe. But he loves being sucked up to. Can’t get enough of it.”

“So why don’t you do the same thing?”

“I hate that. It’s cheesy. It’s also devious.”

She nodded. “You don’t need to do that. Just show him how much you want the job. Want an omelet?”

“An omelet?” Was there such thing as a tofu omelet? Probably. Tofu and scrambled eggs too, I bet. This could be nasty.

“Yep. You need your protein. I’ll put some Canadian bacon in it. Gordy likes his guys to be meat-eaters, right?”

9

On the way into work I popped a CD into the dashboard slot of the rented Geo Metro. It was one of my vast collection of tapes and CDs of motivational talks by the god worshipped by all salesmen, the great motivational speaker and training guru Mark Simkins.

I’d probably listened to this CD,
Be a Winner,
five hundred times. I could recite long stretches of it word for word, mimicking Mark Simkins’s emphatic, singsong voice, his nasal Midwestern accent, his bizarre, halting phraseology. He taught me never ever to use the word “cost” or “price” with a customer. It was “total investment.” Also, “contract” was a scary word; you should say “paperwork” or “agreement.” And never ask a prospect to “sign” an agreement—you “endorsed” the copies or “okayed” the agreement. But most of all he taught that you had to believe in yourself.

Sometimes I listened to the discs just to get myself fired up, to stiffen my spine, give myself a tequila shot of confidence. It was as if Mark Simkins were my personal coach, cheering me on in the privacy of my car, and I needed all the confidence I could get for my interview with Gordy.

By the time I got to Framingham, I was swimming in caffeine—I’d brought the extra-large travel Thermos—and totally pumped. I walked from the parking lot reciting like a mantra a couple of my favorite Mark Simkins lines: “Believe in yourself one hundred percent, and everyone else will have no choice but to follow you.”

And: “
Expect
good things to happen.”

And: “The only thing that counts is how many times you succeed. For the more times you fail and keep trying, the more times you succeed.” That one was like a Zen koan to me. I used to repeat it over and over trying to crack its wisdom. I still wasn’t totally sure what it meant, but I repeated it to myself every time I got dinged on a sales call, and it made me feel better.

Hey, whatever it takes.

Gordy kept me waiting outside his office for a good twenty, twenty-five minutes. He always kept people waiting. It was a power thing, and you just got used to it. I could see him through the window, pacing back and forth with his headset on, gesticulating wildly. I sat there at an empty cubicle next to his secretary, Melanie, who’s a sweet, pretty woman, very tall, with long brown hair, a couple of years older than me. She apologized repeatedly—that seemed to be her main job description, apologizing to everyone he kept waiting—and offered to get me coffee. I said no. Any more caffeine and I’d go into orbit.

Melanie asked me how the game went last night, and I told her how we’d won, without getting into detail about our ringer. She asked me how Kate was, and I asked her about her husband, Bob, and their three cute little kids. We made small talk for a couple of minutes until her phone started ringing.

At close to eight-thirty, Gordy’s door opened and he came barreling through. Both of his stubby arms were extended in welcome, as if he wanted to give me a bear hug. Gordy, who looks sort of like a bear cub, only not cute, is a very huggy person. If he’s not hugging, he’s got an arm on your shoulder.

“Steadman,” he said. “How’re you doing there, buddy?”

“Hey, Gordy,” I said.

“Melanie, get my buddy Steadman here some coffee, could you?”

“Already offered, Kent,” said Melanie, turning around from her cubicle. She was the only one in the office who called him by his first name. The rest of us had largely forgotten he had a first name.

“Water?” he said. “Coke? Scotch?” He threw his head back and brayed, a sort of open-mouth cackle.

“Scotch on the rocks sounds good to me,” I said. “Breakfast of champions.”

He brayed again, put his arm around my shoulder, and pulled me into the vast expanse of his office. In his floor-to-ceiling windows you could see turquoise ocean and palm trees, the waves crashing against the perfect white sand. Really a magnificent view, enough to make you forget you were in Framingham.

Gordy sank into his ergonomic desk chair and leaned back, and I sat in the chair across from him. His desk was a ridiculously large oblong of black marble, which he kept fanatically neat. The only thing on it was a giant, thirty-inch Entronics flat-panel LCD monitor and a blue folder, which I assumed was my personnel file.

“So, man,” he said with a long, contented sigh, “you want a promotion.”

“I do,” I said, “and I think I’d kick ass.”

Believe in yourself one hundred percent, and everyone else will have no choice but to follow you,
I chanted silently.

“I’ll bet you would,” he said, and there was no irony in his voice. He seemed to mean it, and that surprised me. He fixed me with his small brown eyes. Some of us in the Band of Brothers—not Trevor or Gleason, who were famous suck-ups—referred to Gordy’s eyes as “beady” or “ferretlike,” but right now they seemed warm and moist and sincere. His eyes were set deeply beneath a low, Cro-Magnon brow. He had a large head, a double chin, a ruddy face that reminded me of a glazed ham, with deep acne pits on his cheeks. His dark brown hair—another Just For Men victim, I assumed—was cut in a layered pompadour. There were times when I could imagine him as the tubby little kid in school he must have been.

Now he hunched forward and studied my file. His lips moved a tiny bit as he read. As he flipped the pages with a stubby paw, you could see a flash of monogrammed cuff link. Everything he wore was monogrammed with a big script KG.

There was no reason for him to be reading my file right in front of me except to rattle me. I knew that. So I repeated to myself, silently: “
Expect
good things to happen.”

I looked around the office. In one corner of his office he had a golf putter in a mahogany stand next to an artificial-turf putting mat. On a shelf in his credenza was a bottle of Talisker eighteen-year-old single-malt Scotch, which he liked to brag was the only Scotch he drank. If so, he must have made a real dent in the world supply of it because he drank a lot.

“Your annual reviews aren’t bad at all,” he said.

From Gordy, this was a rave. “Thanks,” I said. I watched the surf crashing against the dazzling white sand, the palm trees swaying in the gentle breeze, the seagulls circling and diving into the azure water. Gordy’d had the latest Entronics QD-OLED prototype PictureScreen installed in his windows, and the resolution and colors were perfect. You could change the high-definition video loop to one of a dozen scenes, any of which was better than the view overlooking the parking lot. Gordy liked the ocean—he owned a forty-four-foot Slipstream catamaran, which he kept in the Quincy marina—so his background films were always the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Caribbean. The PictureScreen was a real breakthrough in display technology, and we owned it. It could be manufactured in any size, and the screen was flexible, could be rolled up like a poster, and there wasn’t a better, crisper picture available anywhere. Customers and potential customers who visited Gordy in his office always gasped, and not just at what a pompous jerk he was. It was strange, though, when you walked into Gordy’s office at seven or eight in the morning and saw midday Caribbean sunlight.

“You were Salesman of the Year three years ago, Steadman,” he said. “Club four years running.” He gave a low whistle. “You like Grand Cayman?”

The Cayman Islands was one of the trips the company sent the Salesman of the Year on. “Great diving,” I said.

“Diving for dollars.” He tipped his head back, opened his mouth, did a silent bray.

“I’m impressed you were able to sell UPS those self-keystoning projectors. They wanted compression technology, and we don’t do compression technology.”

“I sold them on future compatibility.”

“Booya,” he said, nodding.

That was Gordy’s way of congratulating people. He was being too nice, which made me nervous. I was expecting his usual frontal assault.

“Morgan Stanley?” he said.

“They’ve got an RFP on the street, but they won’t talk to me. Got to be an inside job. I’m just column fodder.”

“Sounds right,” he said. “They’re just specking the competition. Send ’em back their lousy RFP.”

“I’m not going to make it easy for them,” I said.

His smile twisted up at one end, making him look appropriately Mephistophelian.

“And it looks like FedEx hasn’t delivered yet, huh?”

“FedEx wants a bunch of LCD projectors for their logistics center, to display the weather and all that, twenty-four/seven. I demo’d it for them in Memphis.”

“And?”

“They’re jerking me around. They’re looking at Sony and Fujitsu and NEC and us. Doing a side-by-side shoot-out.”

“Deciding on price point, no doubt.”

“I’m trying to sell them on quality and reliability. Better investment in the long run, all that. I’d say we’ve got a thirty percent chance of winning it.” That was a complete hallucination.

“That high, huh?”

“That’s my take. I wouldn’t forecast it, though.”

“Albertson’s fell through,” he said, with a sad shake of the head. Albertson’s is the second-largest supermarket chain in the country. They own thousands of supermarkets, drugstores, and gas stations, and they wanted to put in digital signage in a bunch of their stores. That would have meant fifteen-inch flat-panel LCD screens at every checkout lane—I guess so you wouldn’t have to read the
National Enquirer
and then put it back in the rack—and forty-two-inch plasmas throughout the store. They were calling it a storewide “network” that would “provide our customers with relevant information and solutions during their visits to the stores.” Translation: ads. Brilliant idea—they wouldn’t even have to pay for the equipment. It was going to be installed by this middleman, a company called SignNetwork that bought and installed all this stuff in stores. The screens would run ads for Walt Disney videos and Kodak and Huggies diapers. I’d been dealing with both Albertson’s and SignNetwork, trying to sell them on the advantages of paying a bit more for quality and all that. No dice.

“They went with NEC,” I said.

“Why?”

“You want to know the truth? Jim Letasky. He’s NEC’s top sales guy, and he basically owns the SignNetwork account. They don’t want to deal with any other company. They love the guy.”

“I know Letasky.”

“Nice guy,” I said. Unfortunately. I wished I could hate the guy, since he was stealing so much of our business, but I’d met him at the Consumer Electronics show a couple of years back, and he was great. They say people buy from people they like; after we had a drink,
I
was almost ready to buy a bunch of NEC plasmas from Jim Letasky.

He fell silent again. “And Lockwood drags on like a case of the clap. You column fodder there too?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not giving up on this one, though, right?”

“Give up? Me?”

He smiled. “That’s not you, is it?”

“Nope.”

“Let me ask you something, Steadman. Hope you don’t mind if I get too personal. You got problems in your marriage?”

“Me?” I shook my head, flushing despite my best efforts. “We’re great.”

“Your wife sick or something?”

“She’s fine.” Like: What the hell?

“You have cancer, maybe?”

I half smiled, said quietly, “I’m in good health, Gordy, but thanks for asking.”

“Then what the hell’s your problem?”

I was silent while I pondered the best way to answer that wouldn’t get me fired.

“Four years in a row you’re Club 101. Then you’re what? You’re Festino.”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t close.”

“That’s not the case, Gordy. I was Salesman of the Year.”

“In a great market for plasma and LCDs. Rising tide floats all boats.”

“My boat floated higher.”

“Your boat still seaworthy? That’s the question. Look at the last year. See, I’m starting to wonder whether you’re hitting the wall. Happens, sometimes, to sales guys at this point in their careers. Lose that spark. You still have the fire in the belly?”

It’s called acid reflux, and I was feeling it right now.

“It’s still there,” I said. “You know, like they say the only thing that counts is how many times you succeed. The more times you fail and keep trying, the more times you succeed.”

“I don’t want to hear any of that Mark Simkins candy-ass crapola here,” he said. Busted. “He’s full of it. The more times you fail, the more accounts you lose.”

“I don’t think that’s what he means, Gordy,” I began.

“‘
Expect
good things to happen,’” he said, doing an unexpectedly good imitation of Mark Simkins, halfway between Mister Rogers and the Reverend Billy Graham, if you can imagine that. “Well, in the real world that we’re living in here, I expect a shitstorm every day, and I come prepared with my rubber poncho and
galoshes,
you get me? That’s how it works in the real world, not in Candy-Ass Land. Now, you and Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason want to do a side-by-side? See who drives a bigger piece of the number? See who’s up-and-coming and who’s history?”