Ladies' Man (7 page)

"Awright, what's, the story here, cream sachet again?" I picked one up and flipped it back into the pile. "That shit don't move, whata they always givin' us cream sachet for?"

"It moves," Al said confidently. Fat Al. He was one of those "successful" salesmen. He even had a magnetized plastic ivory dollar-bill symbol on his dashboard.

"C'mon, Al, I had two hundred a these last week. I think I gave away twenty. Whatever happened to those liberation Afro Pics?"

"Where you gonna go with Afro Pics in the West Village?" Jerry grabbed two enormous fistfuls of sachet and stuffed one in each of his sport jacket pockets. When he stood up he looked like a pack mule. It always amazed me how little people cared about their appearance. Especially in our line of work. It took such little effort to make yourself presentable. If you didn't think enough of yourself to look groomed, how the hell could you expect anybody else to dig you?

I laughed out loud and everybody turned their heads to the window to see what I broke up about. Less than an hour ago I was freaking out because my existence made me feel like a gerbil on an exercise wheel, now I was rifling with equal intensity about good grooming. Life was wild.

"Hey, death of a salesman!" Maurice gave out a horselaugh that would embarrass a horse and flipped a cream sachet foil into my lap.

When I dropped out of college all I had was twenty-five credits to go. I always wound up thinking about that on mornings like this.

"Let's go, head 'em out!" Al got up from the table with an exaggerated groan, lugged his green alligator case from under the table and we all followed him down the aisle like an executive road gang.

"George"—I flipped a cream sachet foil onto the grill—"you look like shit."

When we hit the street I was not in an up-and-at-'em mood. I didn't even think I could sell a blood clot to a hemophiliac but I lucked out on my first shot—scored for a twenty-dollar sale on Bask Street to a kind-faced old German lady in a faded floral housedress. She had sandbag breasts and big red hands. Those hands looked as if they were in raw meat all day. She lived in a long, dimly lit apartment with clunky dark wooden furniture, brocade covers over everything and about six thousand prowling cats. We sat on facing sofas, me with the case and her with those huge meathooks folded calmly in her lap and a ruddy creased smile on her refugee face. She bought everything I showed her—hand lotion, room spray, an ironing board protector. She never said a word, just nodded for "one" when I asked, "Now how many should I put you down for, one or two?" When she bought a Car-Vac, my portable car rug vacuum cleaner in a can, I knew she was just buying all that shit so I would stick around and keep making human noises. That stuff always tore me up. I would always get those lonely older ladies who would buy anything I had to sell just to have my company. If they ordered something, not only would I have to sit there to sell it, but I would have to come back the end of the week and deliver it And they would always have cats. Millions of cats. I was allergic to cats, too. I hated them. I'd sit there on some overstuffed cat-hair couch running my bullshit, sneezing my brains out, eyes like red stars, and these poor ladies would be holding their own hands nodding nodding nodding, smiling smiling smiling, sometimes silent like the German lady, sometimes gushing out the spew of their sad sad lives, getting up, bustling around with their bookcase bebinds, offering me tea, coffee, sponge cake, cheesecake, pound cake, cupcake, kugel, babka—you name it. And half of them couldn't even speak English.

Anyway, after she bought the Car-Vac and introduced me to seven or eight cats—and you have no idea what an absolute schmuck you feel like nodding hello to a cat—I had to split. I felt as if there was a big hairy angora stuffed comfortably inside -each lung and I wasn't so much breathing as leaking air. I even started sneezing blood.

But I made her day. Every day on the job I made somebody's day. Made that human connection. There were more lonely people in New York than in entire European countries. And every day I found at least one and pulled her back into the real world for thirty minutes. As much as I bitched about cats and crazies, making that connection hit the spot with me. I got a nice little high every time I scored a lonely. Without getting grandiose about it, it was a side benefit that sometimes made my work tolerable. But there was an element of half-assed compromise in that aspect of my life too. Because, despite the good moments, the bottom line was that I still had to sell them some bullshit ironing board cover or hand cream. And I spent a lot of time knocking on empty apartment doors or spieling to jerk-offs.

The German lady was followed by a half-hour of nothing, then two back-to-back sales on Greenwich Avenue and then I totally lucked out. I caught three housewives kibitzing in the home of a fourth. When I announced through the locked door that I was the Bluecastle Housewares man I heard one broad say, "I don't know about Bluecastle Housewares, but I can sure use a man." They all cracked up, the locks were unlocked and I was home free. I was the absolute master of the soft-core innuendo. I knew how to come on saucy but not smutty, naughty but not filthy. I could read a person's tolerance level for the risque as fast as it took an expert to pick your watch while shaking your hand. I didn't waste any time with these four. I whipped out my foaming hand lotion and demonstrated it by rubbing it first into my hands,, then into their hands. I said, "It's also good for a couple of other things, but I won't go into that," and gave an X-rated wink. I had no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean, but they had a group apoplexy. I walked out of there a half-hour later with a forty-dollar order and my gut sloshing with coffee.

So it was almost noon and I had written close to eighty dollars. That was a decent day right there. Usually I would try to write up seventy-five to a hundred dollars a day," pull a five-day week, take home two-fifty to three hundred, and I was happy. I was no freak for money. I wasn't going to Red China for a vacation or buying a brownstone. I didn't have kids, my place was within my means, La Donna chipped in some, I had nice clothes, -so with an eighty-dollar morning I was very happy. If I scored for fifteen, twenty dollars more early in the afternoon I would knock off and go to a movie instead of busting my
mates for the extra few bucks I might make over that. And that's the way I was. I didn't have it so bad. The job was okay. Better than most. And if I took a year out of my life and finished college? Then what? What was I supposed to become, a social Worker? Would I go to graduate school? Would I become a $60,000-a-year ad exec giving blowjobs to the Cheerios account representative so I could keep writing jingles? Bullshit. And teaching was a nice little pipe dream, but unless I was willing to do the South Bronx, who was hiring? So big deal I read books. So did a housewife. Besides, I had the diction of a neighborhood bookie, and my degree was geared for business administration. So, later for that. I made more money than most college graduates, did more good for people, too. And I didn't feel inferior because I didn't have my degree. I was smart. I was one of the smartest people I knew. I didn't need a piece of paper to tell me that.

So I was feeling good. Feeling more like a person, a talker, I went back to the diner for lunch. I ordered good food. I didn't eat garbage. A nice strip steak, some cottage cheese and Tab. Kept myself good and tight, lots of protein. Fucking Al might have been King Shit when it came to sales, but I'd still be doing a hundred and fifty sit-ups a day when he'd be pushing up daisies.

After lunch I sat, I relaxed, I had coffee and read the paper. Maurice came in. He sat down across from me, flipped his order pad on the table and twisted in the booth to flag down Charlene.

"Relax, Maurice." Charlene was wiping the counter and spoke to him with controlled distaste.

Grabbing his pad, I did a quick tally of his day's sales: sixty dollars. I won. One order caught my eye. It was for eight shower caps, paid in full.

"Hey, what's this?" I turned the pad to him. "Eight shower caps," he chuckled. "Yeah, I see that Who the hell buys eight shower caps? Whata you doing, you workin' seniles again?"

"Nah, it was a girl. I showed her all the different colors she could get and she liked them all so she got 'em all." He laughed. "Char-le-ene," he singsonged, tickled with himself.

Anytime I felt low all I had to do was compare myself to Maurice. But sometimes I wondered what he had been like twenty years earlier when he was my age. Or better still, what was
I
going to be in twenty years? Well, shit, at least I wouldn't be like Maurice. But what did that leave, Fat Al? Maybe not that way either. But one thing I would be, if things didn't change, was a fifty-year-old Bluecastle Housewares man. No good. No good at all. The notion nauseated me, wrenched me out of the diner and back to work.

It was pushing three-thirty and I hadn't made one connection since lunch. I was in a rage, in a panic. I got into the nervous habit of squeezing my crotch, like I was applying a tourniquet. That afternoon became a disaster. I blew sales right and left. I was surly, impatient—as if it was
their
fucking fault that
I
had to stomp around in icy February weather selling that bullshit and the least they could goddamn do was
buy
the crap, for Christ's sake.

At a three-story brick building on Eleventh Street I finally decided that this was it, whatever I did in that building was it for the day. There was no elevator and the hallways were somebody's idea of the future. They were wallpapered with what looked like silver foil. There were only twelve apartments. No one was home in the first eight. A real nelly faggot came to the door in the ninth; a short, skinny, limp wrist with a sinus cold that gave him a nose like Rudolph the reindeer. He kept schlepping on his beak while eyeing the contents of my case through the six inches the chain lock allowed. He closed the door on me without saying sorry or no thank you, and I was stuck with all my cans and boxes sprouting around my feet like mushrooms. I muttered "Faggot" louder than I meant to, but I doubt that he heard me, and I had mixed feelings about that fact.

The name on the next door was Gordon. At that point I wasn't expecting anything miraculous. Even though I felt sorry for myself, I was also feeling a little better because after two more doors I could go home.

"Just a minute."

She sounded young and I quickly tucked my shirt into the elastic band of my shorts to flatten my gut Three chains unlocked, the door swung open, and hey hey there she was, about five-ten, long red hair like Rita Whatever and wearing, no lie, a nightgown. It was two-forty-five in the P.M.. and she was wearing a nightgown.

"Yeah?" She was half-smiling as though she had just woke up from a nice dream, and she leaned her head sleepily on the door frame, totally relaxed, totally un-paranoid about me.

. "Hi! I've got a free gift from Bluecastle for you!" What a schmuck. I raised my sample case slightly and pointed my chin at the apartment door. "Mind if I come in?"

"Oh yeah? What kind of free gift?" She yawned and rubbed the heel of her hand into her eyes. " 'Scuse me."

"We ran out of whips and vibrators." I pulled out one of those shit-ass cream sachet foils from my jacket pocket and held it up casually between two fingers, like an ID.

"Hawaii Five-O, ma'am, mind if we come in and look around?" My best shot.

"That's not much of a gift." Her skin was lightly sprayed with acne scars and a vaguely sour morning mouth smell drifted over to me. Nothing turned me off like bad breath, but I knew morning mouth was unavoidable.

"It's a door opener; I got better stuff in here." I tapped my case. She wasn't that nice-looking. It felt very important to feel that I kept thinking about morning mouth and how someday we were all going to die no matter what.

She slowly turned from the door and walked unsteadily into the living room. I followed her in. The light from the living room window revealed her legs through her nightgown, and I immediately got one of those boners that start from the heart For a fast two seconds I rubbed my crotch viciously behind her back, clenching my teeth and looking like a psycho.

She sat down in a flimsy, white, slightly unraveled wicker chair and hunched over, elbows on knees, hands crossed to her shoulders like she was shielding her tits from me. I sat across from her on a burgundy fake velvet sofa and opened my case between my feet. I could tell she lived alone. Two gilt-framed pictures of her parents, lot of plants, tortoise shell window shades, a portable typewriter on a cheap one-piece molded white plastic table, a stack of
New York
and
Times
., magazines piled on the bottom rack of a TV stand, a small TV with aluminum foil on the antenna—I could tell plenty. And I could see somewhat between her knees if I ducked my head a little.

She nodded toward the case, a smirk on her face as if she had read my mind.

"So let's hear it."

The sleep was gone from her eyes, which were light green. I preferred dark eyes.

"You like coconuts? Everybody likes coconuts, right?" I plucked out a small aerosol can of room spray and shpritzed briefly in front of her. I inhaled with my eyes at half-mast as if I was smelling baked bread. Her eyelids fluttered as she jerked her head back, coughing into her fingers. Her knees parted for a second and I saw thigh.

"What? You don't like that!" I looked stunned. "It smells like Pago Pago in here now!"

She waved her hand in front of her face as if to clear the air. She had intelligent eyes; they had character. I parted my legs a little. I wanted her to know I had a hard-on.

"Do you know who my biggest customer for coconut room spray is? And I'm not lying." I leaned back and squinted. "Take a guess."

"Somebody in your immediate family, I imagine." She pumped a cigarette from a matching unraveling white wicker lamp table next to her.

"Nope, Terence Cardinal Cooke." I narrowed my eyes and pointed a finger. "
Us loves
the stuff and has instructed the custodian at Saint Patrick's to snag a dozen cans every time I come by the church. Next time you go in there, smell the air."