Self-Made Man (26 page)

At the end of Dano's speech we got our marching orders. Incentives for the day. If you sold up to five sets of books you would get the usual thirteen dollars per set. If you sold between five and ten sets of books you'd get fifteen dollars per set, and if you sold between ten and fifteen sets of books you'd get twenty dollars per set. We were setting out in teams of threes. The first team back to the office having sold all fifteen books would get an added bonus of three hundred dollars. The cut-off time, or DQ (disqualification) time, was 6:30 p.m.

Ivan had arranged it so that he and I would be riding with Tiffany, the pregnant eighteen-year-old that he was out to fuck by nightfall. The minute we got in the car Ivan started scheming about how we could win the three-hundred-dollar bonus. He pulled into the parking lot of a Wendy's to let Tiffany get something to eat.

He and I were standing by the car doing the math.

“What about if you go to an ATM, buy all fifteen books with your own money, then we'll get back to the office first, get twenty dollars per book and the bonus?” he said, his eyes widening.

“I'd only just break even,” I said. “I'd shell out three hundred dollars and only get three hundred dollars back. We've actually got to sell them or it won't work.”

“Fuck,” said Ivan. “All right then. We've got to use Tiffany. She's got big tits and you've seen her walk. She's got an advantage.”

I had to admit, she had a sashay that belied her age, but still, she was an eighteen-year-old unwed mother-to-be who lived on junk food and Diet Coke, and who worked on her feet all day because she had no other choice. Her baby's father, as I'd learned in the car, was in prison for dealing drugs. She had just about the shittiest prospects of anyone in the company, and all Ivan could think of was how he could pimp her to make a quick buck or get his dick off. He was merciless.

When Tiffany came back to the car Ivan told her outright what he'd planned. The idea, he told her, was to drop multiples in a single location and get back to the office as soon as possible. Businesses were often good places for dumping multiples, because the coupon books were a tax write-off for business owners and could be offered as employee or even client incentives. To make the best use of Tiffany, we'd have to target a male business, he explained, like a tool-and-die shop or a car dealership.

She was happy to play the role. She felt it was in her best interests to walk as little as possible.

“Besides,” she sighed, exhaling on a cigarette she'd just lit, “I really need that bonus.”

“You want it,” Ivan said, winking at me in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, I really want it,” she said.

“Well, trust me,” he said, peeking at me again and smirking at the double entendre, “you're gonna get it.”

Tiffany lifted up her shirt just past the navel. She was wearing a white blouse over a tight white lycra tank top. She wanted to know if we thought she was showing too much to pull off the vixen maneuver. The poor-pregnant-girl routine would work against us, we decided.

“Nah, you're fine,” said Ivan.

We set off, looking for a car dealership on the main drag. Ivan was pumping me for a workable scenario, something that Tiffany could run with, something that would help her dump the merch quickly.

“C'mon, you're the former writer,” he said.

So I ventured the following: Tiffany is the only woman in an office full of guys—not far from the truth. They don't respect her—again, not a lie. It's her first week on the job and they want her to quit, so they've sent her out with more merch than she can possibly drop in a few hours. They've got an interoffice bet that she'll fail. They've sent her out with Ivan, who doesn't speak much English, because he's the only guy who'll have anything to do with her.

Ivan liked this. “Yeah, yeah, good, okay,” he said.

“I'll wait in the car,” I said, ashamed.

By then Ivan had found a car dealership, pulled up on a side street and parked the car out of sight. Tiffany was unbuttoning her blouse and adjusting her tits to maximum advantage. Due to the pregnancy, they were already fairly monstrous for her still slight frame. With the blouse totally unbuttoned, she was all business up front. When she got out of the car and started her cakewalk across the lot toward the showroom, legs striding, chest out, hips kicking back and forth under her miniskirt, her blouse trailing like a flag behind her in the breeze, suddenly I felt fairly sure she understood all too well the double meaning of “swallows.” She knew what she was doing. It was pretty awful to see. Like Troy, she was using for what it was worth the very thing they used against her. Also like Troy, she was a pretty successful salesperson.

Ivan followed her into the showroom, walking a few paces behind to let her have her full effect. They were gone for about twenty minutes. I took this to be a good sign. But when they straggled back to the car, they hadn't made a sale. We tried another dealership and a body shop on the strip, but nothing doing, so we decided to hit some residential neighborhoods and do it the old-fashioned way, door-to-door.

This was where I got my first chance to pitch. It was a nice, generic upper-middle-class neighborhood with carefully sodded plots, groomed driveways and enviable cars. People were out mowing their lawns or playing with their kids, lots of dads doing their Saturday duties with the munchkins, throwing a baseball or wielding the hose. And there I was, the loathsome solicitor in his loafers, having to walk up to these people and give them the worst, most depressive sales pitch they'd probably ever heard.

It's very humbling to become the thing you hate. I felt like an insect loping into people's private lives in my snappy clothes. I couldn't bring myself to smile gregariously. Sheepish was the best I could do. On my first ten or so pitches, the first words out of my mouth were always “I'm sorry.” Because I was. I was really sorry to be foisting my ratty little coupon books on anyone, especially in their homes.

“I'm sorry to bother you,” I'd say or, “I hate to get in your way.” It was the only thing in the entire pitch that I said wholeheartedly. The rest came out like the shit it was, and people mostly just shook their heads and closed their doors without saying a word.

Most of the pitch was a script that you had to memorize and practice in front of the mirror or role-play with another salesman. There was no getting away from it. They tested you on it in the morning rap sessions. One of the guys would walk up to you, punch your shoulder and say, “Let's hear your pitch.”

If you didn't jump in with appropriate gusto they'd think you lacked enthusiasm and take you to the corner for a pep talk with management.

“Hi,” I'd say, “my name is Ned Vincent and I'm here today on behalf of the local businesses in your area to let you know about some new promotions they're offering. Some of your neighbors are already taking advantage of these opportunities and we want to make sure you're getting all the discounts you qualify for.”

It was awful. I was deflato-Ned, all the moxie of my suit taken right out of me by this greasy speech and the dismissive reception it usually got. When they saw me coming, people must have thought I was some kind of forlorn Mormon, slinking along resignedly from house to house. I'd see a curtain rustle in a front window and no one would answer the bell.

Needless to say, I sold nothing that day. Ivan and Tiffany sold only two books each, and we spent the last hour of the day sitting in a Starbucks licking our wounds. By then it was pretty clear that Ivan wasn't making headway with Tiffany. When she went to the bathroom he tried to salvage his pride, snarling in my direction, “Ah, she was worth a blow job, maybe. Nothing more.”

Back at the office it turned out that Doug, the usual high roller at Clutch, who had been poised for weeks to make the leap to assistant management, had won the bonus as usual by convincing Dano to send him out with twenty books instead of fifteen. Nobody else had a chance. He probably bought several of them himself in an Ivan-type scheme to ensure a win. But then again he was known for dropping copiously all over town every day, so it was likely that he actually sold them.

He was a weasel-faced, scrawny little climber who lived the business and the company line like a true believer. He was an ex-marine, and like every other guy at Clutch, this was his ticket to the highlife and a wife who was better looking than he could have ever imagined. He was only twenty-three, but he was already boasting about retiring at thirty-five.

At the end of the day, everyone settled up with Dano, who sat behind his desk like a small-time drug lord, doling and raking the petty cash from the afternoon's transactions. Kid Rock was blasting in the rumpus room, and the guys were all slapping and hollering off the stress of the day. You couldn't avoid it. The minute you appeared, somebody would grab you by the hand and work your fingers mechanically, like a monkey humping your leg, a socially acceptable male-to-male relief.

“Hey, Ned, what's up, man?” they'd say, and genuinely wait for the expected answer, as if checking you for signs of malfunction or alien intelligence. If you didn't mingle fingers they'd wonder about you, like you were thinking too hard to be normal. Some of the guys wore gold rhino pins in their lapels, the sign that they'd been promoted to “leadership,” an intermediate sop between newbiehood and assistant management. I asked one of the guys why a rhino.

“Because rhinos can't walk backward,” he beamed.

 

Oversexed and vicious as he could be, Ivan kept me going, because he had as much contempt for the whole ethos of the place as I did. Not that we were above its momentary charms, especially when they were the only charge you were likely to get out of the day. When you were selling, or as Ivan called it, when you were “in the zone,” you felt like a holy vessel of mammon, and it was unmistakably sexual. Every sale was a con, but a slightly different con, depending on the person who answered the door. You had to dance around their weak points, and punch it home when you saw the opening. Every sale made you more confident, and more confidence produced more sales, the coaches were right enough about that.

It happened to me one day when I was out with Ivan again, taking egg on my face, rejection after rejection, until I felt sure that I would never make a sale. Ivan had been making ceaseless fun of me all day, watching me pitch on the doorsteps as he sat smoking and smirking in the car.

“Take control, dude,” he'd say. “Have a pair. Jesus.”

At one house we drove up to an old woman who was pacing her front yard for a little exercise, a prime buyer, Ivan assured me. But before I could get past the first sentence she shut me down cold. “We're not interested.”

I was still too fresh and embarrassed to know that you never stopped there, so I just said, “Oh, okay then. Thanks anyway.”

As we drove off Ivan said, “Unbelievable. You just got bitch-slapped by a ninety-year-old lady.”

And that's how it went for the rest of the afternoon, until around five o'clock, by which time Ivan was singing rap songs to goad me. “All right, here we go,” he'd say as we pulled up at the next inevitable defeat. “Shake your ass. Watch yourself. Show me what you're workin' with.”

Then finally, at what felt like the hundredth house I'd pitched that day, some guy who didn't look like the type just rolled over and handed me the forty bucks. I couldn't believe it. Neither could Ivan. And I have to admit it felt good to relieve someone of a little cash for once, even if it meant relinquishing a piece of my cherished moral superiority in the process.

The corruption of the sell caught me up very quickly after that, and in the space of a few hours I went from being the gawky virgin who pops his cherry in the cathouse to the slick postman who always rings twice. I made six more sales before quitting time, winning even Ivan's smug endorsement in the process. I proved my manhood, took control, showed my balls, whatever—the very thing I had failed to do repeatedly in the field, not only at Clutch, but at the other Red Bull firms I'd visited.

At Borg Consulting, I had spent my second day on the job out with another twenty-three-year-old guy who, in his high-octane, hormone-driven approach to the business, was very much like Ivan and Doug. He, too, saw himself retiring in his early thirties. He, too, sexualized everything into a zero-sum game. Like Ivan, he was confused and frustrated by my inability to show the requisite balls in pitching customers.

“You're a man,” he'd say. “You gotta pitch like a man.”

He was very clear on this point. Girls pitched differently. They flirted. They cajoled and smiled and eased their way into the sales underhandedly, which was exactly how I'd started out trying to do it. I'd tried initially to ask for the sale the way I asked for food in a restaurant as a woman, or the way I asked for help at a gas station—pleadingly. But coming from a man this was off-color. It didn't work. It bred contempt in both men and women. In this sense it was very much like trying to pick up a woman in a bar. As a guy, I had to shed my sympathy for myself and the victim, and the appearance of weakness and need. People see weakness in a woman and they want to help. They see weakness in a man and they want to stamp it out.

When I made my first sale that afternoon with Ivan, I stepped over this divide. I got back the attitude I'd had in my interviews, and the more I saw it working in people's minds and on their faces, turning them over to my side, the more I used it to my advantage.