Everything You Need: Short Stories (20 page)

L
ater
, sitting on his porch in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the wind moving through the tops of the trees. He drank a warm beer, and then another. He looked at the grime on his hands. He wondered what it was that made some people catch sight of the sign, what it was in their eyes, what it was in the way they looked, that made them see. He wondered how the man in the big house had done it, and hoped he had not suffered much. He wondered why he had never attempted the same thing. He wondered why it was only on nights like these that he was able to remember that his boy had been dead twenty years.

Finally he went indoors and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He did this every night, even though there was never anything there to see: nothing unless it is that sad, dark thing that eventually takes us in its arms and makes us sleep.

H
i
. I’m James Richard. No, not ‘Richards’, but ‘Richard’. Dumb name, I think you’ll agree. No, it’s okay. Really. Enjoy yourself. I’ve had many years to savour the name, to laboriously spell it out over the phone and find parcels arriving at my door marked for Richard James anyhow. I didn’t even make it up. It’s not a stage name. My parents gave it to me when I was born, bless them — along with a very straight nose, nice wavy brown hair, and next to no talent at all.

‘Why,’ I asked my father one time, back when I was young in years and full of hope, ‘Why in the name of sweet Jesus did you call me James Richard?’

He stared down at me, confused, and I belatedly realised he was in the same predicament. His name was David. David Richard. Maybe when he was young his peers also snarled ‘Hey, shithead — why have you got two first names?’ For a moment I felt a strange and poingnant affinity with my dad, as if we were holding hands down the years, two small boys a generation apart who’d shouldered a similar burden.

Then I kicked him in the shin.

Anyway. This isn’t about my name. This is about what I do, and what I do is I’m a presenter on a shopping channel. No, go ahead. Laugh all you like. Just the stupidest job in the whole damned universe, right? Well, you know, screw you. If I hear one more person say a chimp could do my job then I’m going to take some innovative and durable kitchen implement — retailing in stores for $19.99 but available for this hour only at the low-low price of $11.99 plus postage and packing — and shove it up their ass.

This is a skill. It really is.

And it saved my life.

I
wound
up in home shopping via a circuitous route. Everyone does. Nobody wakes up one morning thinking ‘Hey, I want to be on live cable selling people shit they don’t need.’ Or perhaps they do, in which case they genuinely
are
stupid. Maybe they think it counts as television, and is therefore glamorous. It’s not. The point of being on the tube is first, to earn big bucks; second, to be recognised in the street. Anyone who tells you different is a moron. What — they instead want the unsociable hours, the threat of being sacked at any moment, the ever-present danger of exposure and embarrassment — not to mention the joy of standing under hot lights while hairy-backed yahoos point cameras at you and swop impenetrable jokes behind your back? The money in cable really isn’t that great, and the people you actually
want
to recognise you are pretty young things of the opposite sex. Or of the same sex, whatever. You work a shopping channel then these are not the people who are going to being recognising you. They’re going to be... well, I’ll come to that.

I was an actor originally. I was profoundly average, and there’s only so many times you can emote your heart out to scraggly-bearded directors to then be told you’re insufficiently tall or Turkish-looking or female or frankly even any
good
. So I switched to stand-up as a kind of holding pattern. Easier to get gigs, but the money stinks like fish and I couldn’t write my own material so I was going nowhere fast. Finally there was a spell on a local radio news station for which cattle made up the main demographic. That was
really
grim. It was while I was there, reading out the weather and listening to the neurons in my brain popping one by one, that I saw a trade ad for a presenter on a cable channel. I combed the straw out of my hair, jumped on a plane and went and did my thing. I dug deep, gave it everything I had. I was desperate.

I got the gig.

Now. If you don’t do any home shopping then I’m going to have to explain the deal to you. (If you do, then just skip-read or have a sandwich or something. I’ll be back in a minute). How it works is this. The channels basically have a pile of goods which they want to sell. Pots and pans. Jewelry. Gardening implements. Technical gizmos for the home. Limited Edition Star Trek™ bathmats. The buy-me inducements they offer are severalfold. First, the goods are cheap. No store overheads, plus the advantages of buying in bulk. Two, you just pick up the phone and give a credit card number (hell, just your
name
, if you’re a returning customer) and the thing will be with you in a couple days — without you even having to get up off your couch. I assume when it drops through your mailbox you have to get up and go fetch it, or maybe these people have someone who does that for them too.

The third inducement is people like me. The presenters. Your friend on the screen.

As the audience, this is what you see. A live picture of the object in question with a panel at one side telling you the cost and the product code and just how beguilingly cheap it is compared to normal in-store prices. You listen to a voice-over, with cutaways to the presenter’s face and upper body as he or she tells you how much the thing costs (in case you can’t read), how many are left to buy (‘Only three quarters of our stock left now – this one’s moving
incredibly
quickly everybody, so hurry hurry, pick up your phone and make that call, operators are standing by...’) and also explains to the hard-of-thinking why they should want the damn thing in the first place. If it’s a ring, for example, my job would be to remind you that you could put it on your finger and wear it for cosmetic purposes, in order to enhance your attractiveness and/or perceived status. You think I’m kidding. I’m really not.

Sounds easy, but wait. Sometimes you may have to fill twenty minutes with this crap. You try talking for
half
that time, non-stop — with no help, no cues and moreover with people pointing cameras at you and some fool chattering in your earpiece — explaining why someone would want to buy an enormous cookie jar shaped like a chicken, and you’ll begin to see it’s not as easy as it sounds. Most of the presenters cheat. They’ll repeat themselves endlessly, rehearsing the remaining stock levels time and again just to give themselves something extra to say. I never did that. I never dried. I also never said anything like ‘Today’s special value today is really special,’ as one of my colleagues once did; nor ‘In the sixteenth century was the Renaissance, and garnet was a stone’, another of my personal favorites.

I didn’t do these things because when I found myself in this weird job it was like I’d come home. I knew it was worthless, but on the other hand I thought: Hey — perhaps this is something I could be
good
at. Maybe this was a corner of an ill-regarded field which I could make forever James Richard. Most of the stuff the channel pushed was skull-crushingly dull, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t talk about it. Okay, so it might be a frankly hideous hexagonal pendant in faux gold with a miniscule pseudo-emerald in the middle: but you could point out how
delightfully
hexagonal it was, and how neatly the ‘emeraldite’ sat in its exact centre. You could measure it with the special Home Mall ruler, just in case someone in the audience didn’t understand perspective and was worried that the pendant was as big as a house. You could tell them how
many
different occasions they’d find to wear it, and list them, and generally evoke just how unspeakably lovely their lives would become — all because of this twenty dollar piece of costume jewelry.

The whole time you’re working you have the director talking at you, relaying sales information through a plug in your ear. But I mentioned availability twice, three times in each hour. At
most
. Just enough to keep people on their toes, to convince them they ought to get working that phone. And you can believe this — when I was doing the selling, the units started shifting. That sounds arrogant, I guess. Well, maybe; and so what? For all the times some shithead casting agent dumped on me; for all the times I died on a small stage because the jokes I wrote weren’t funny; for all the times I was shown that I couldn’t do a job well enough to be proud of myself — now I had Home Mall to demonstrate that I could do
something
.

So what if no-one respected it? I could
do it
. That’s what counts.

W
hich is why
, after a couple of months with the station, I found myself handling a lot of the Specials. Every evening there’d be some product the station had a particular deal on. They’d wheel on the manufacturer or other front person with the promise of shifting extra units, and stick him or her on the screen to demonstrate the product. These slots lasted a whole hour, and of course needed a professional to guide the civilian through the live television experience, to keep things running smoothly. And increasingly that professional was me.

Talking about something for ten minutes is one thing. An hour is a
whole
different kettle of ballgames. The big factor you have in your favour is that you aren’t just a talking torso in these slots. You’re there, live on camera, standing next to some guy demonstrating a CD player or salad shooter or car wrench. You can use everything about yourself, not just your voice. Employ your body to suggest things, use hand movements, shrug; if you weren’t too proud you could even pout winsomely. God knows I’ve pouted on occasion, winsomely and otherwise.

All that helped, but the Specials were still tough, and I enjoyed the challenge. As the months went on I might resort to a little cocaine on occasion to keep myself humming along; but my main juice was pure adrenaline. That, and a genuine drive to dance the jig of semi-relevance, to keep the balls in the air when they didn’t deserve to be up there in the first place — to
just keep talking
.

To communicate with the viewer at home.

Once the products were shifting nicely, you see, we’d start taking calls from people who were buying the merchandise. Initially this was the part of the job that most freaked me out. I mean, who the hell
were
these people? What were they doing, calling a shopping channel at 1.30 a.m. on a Wednesday night to tell us why they’d bought some neo-bosnium trinket? Didn’t they have beds to go to? Didn’t they have
lives
? Ninety five percent of the callers were middle-aged women, too, which I found especially hard to get my head around. I could have understood guys in their twenties, maybe, too stoned to change the channel, or thinking they were being ironic. I even suggested to Rod that we should institute a Stoner Hour, where we sold big bags of candy and potato chips along with small glittering baubles which might appeal to the chemically-enhanced mind. People would call up in droves, collapse in bed later and forget all about it, and then be completely bemused when boxes of munchies arrived a couple days after. We could probably get away with not sending out the product at all, which would be a big fat profit all round. (The idea wasn’t taken up, which I think reveals commercial timidity).

I quickly realised that taking the calls was a crucial part of the selling process, however, and made it my specialty. Nobody called in to say that something they’d bought was a piece of shit — they rang in to say it was fabulous. They wanted to say something nice, which meant everyone else listening in got a ringing product endorsement from
someone who was just like them
. I would imagine these callers, dumpy and dough-faced, sitting in darkened rooms around the country, their faces lit by the flicker of the selling screen. Just occasionally I believed that once they’d finished talking to us they abruptly switched off, like abandoned robots, their heads tilting forwards onto their chests, hands folded in their laps — and that they would remain that way until the following night, when they got a chance to talk about their obsessions again. Sometimes this impression was stronger, and I felt I could imagine them all at once, all sitting in their rooms, bathed in the twinkling eeriness of television light, eyes focused on the screen, their loneliness and need pouring back through the cables towards me.

God Bless Cocaine.

T
he job settled into a rhythm
. I’d do a couple of sessions late afternoon or early evening, standard stuff — then at the beginning of the late shift, somewhere between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m., I’d do a Special. The late shift is when the real action begins, the time when the heavy hitters of couch potato-purchasing settle down with their buckets of soda and sacks of potato chips and get into their stride. The products varied wildly but that was part of the fun. The manufacturers were also mixed, from a monosyllabic sauté pan dude who said maybe three words all hour, to a woman I worked with selling a home organ who was damned nearly as good as me.
Christ
did that woman know a lot about organs. I thought she’d never shut up.

Then... okay: here we go.

The night in question I was doing a Special for a cleaning product called Supa Shine. Some dude from Texas had spent ten years working on polishes and had finally come up with a real humdinger. The stuff had been on the channel once before but this was the first time it had gotten its own segment. When I heard what the Special was that evening I thought even
I
was going to have trouble. Metal polish: it’s useful, it may even be essential to some people. But say what you like, it’s really just not very exciting.

An hour before we were due to go on air I dropped by the green room to meet the guy. Rusty, his name was. He was about fifty, grey-haired, bearded and kind of heavy round the gut, but affable enough in a good-old-boy kind of way — and wow, did he like his job. I’m not kidding. Polishing was this guy’s
life
. He’d got into town early that morning and straightaway gone trawling junk stores and antiqueries picking up old bits of silver and copper to use on the show. He showed me how to use the product. The polish was a silvery paste which came in a very small tin. You put a subliminal amount on a rag, wiped it over your metal in a desultory way and then rubbed it off. And it worked. It worked to a freakish degree. I was genuinely impressed. He took an old coin, so dirty and corroded it looked more like a disk of wood, and after about ten seconds it was better than the day it popped out of the mint.