How to Sell Shit
“Yeah, but what did you want to do?” Roger asks. They sit on the curb just outside the firedoor of their hotel. It is too late to be awake if they’re going to move product in the morning, but Gus wanted to smoke and look at the light pollution. After awhile, Roger came out too: his brain was scrambled, he said, and Gus bummed him a cigarette for his nerves.
“Always wanted to be a criminal of some sort,” Gus says. He’s wearing just the pants and jacket of one of his three suits, this one charcoal grey, 100% wool, single-breasted. The jacket has a cauterized hole at the elbow from when he bumped into that twitchy skycap in Reno. “Not a murderer. A smuggler, maybe. Something I wouldn’t regret.”
“Yeah, well I just wanted to be a dad,” Roger says. “Jobs, I don’t know, never thought much about it. I guess one’s as good as another.”
From the curb they can see the neon sprawl about a mile away: tiny logos of Target and AMC and Starbucks, the late-night trickle of cars. Between those lights and their hotel is seven empty lanes and an expanse of sand and rock. Driving from the airport that afternoon they saw huge hangars scattered in that little desert, lurching like monuments to pharaohs. In the dark they look like dead pixels on the monitor.
“This job isn’t like other jobs,” Gus says, and drops his cigarette to the asphalt. “Selling shit isn’t for just anybody.”
Gus stands and steps through the flowerbeds.
“You think I’m cut out for it?” Roger asks. The firedoor slams.
[] [] []
Gus has left the TV on, as always, and his stilted dreams are lousy with images of Harrison Ford, buxom women selling rotisseries, the funeral rites of an Andaman tribe. When the alarm punctures the blankets piled over his head, he thinks he’s set it too late by a decade. He’s old now, older than his father when lung cancer took him at forty-two and older than the man who signs his checks. He crawls out like a hunter poking through his shelter to see that winter endures. In those years of sleep, he lost all of his money, all the connections he’d made. And then he had to slum into that moldy apartment, grovel to strangers for work, eat ramen noodles at dinner for nights on end. He shakes his head, but none of the memories fade like dreams do. The only thing that can help him forget is this ceaseless travel, strange beds and long flights and greasy food.
The suit goes back on, a blood pressure pill goes down the hatch, and he slings an attaché case onto his shoulder. Roger waits for him in the lobby, drinking hotel coffee out of a styrofoam cup and bobbing his leg. He jumps up to meet Gus by the front desk.
“We getting breakfast?”
“They’ve got bagels and shit here. Eat those if you want,” Gus says. “Per diem is lunch, dinner, and five bucks extras. You want real breakfast it’s your dime.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Well?” Gus says as Roger looks into his cup. “Go ahead.”
[] [] []
Gus guns the rental through a yield sign heading to their first call. Past a shopping mall, a skate park and its restless meth-heads, two different traffic stops with Mexicans sitting handcuffed on the curb. Roger slurps the last few drops of hotel coffee and scrolls through the radio stations. He stops on talk radio as it segues into the traffic report.
“Change that shit,” Gus says. “I don’t want to know anything about this city.”
Roger turns the radio off, flips through some things he has in a folder. Gus chews at the tobacco stained skin at the end of his thumb.
“So, what’s the approach?” Roger says, and opens a brochure in his lap.
“We sell the shit,” Gus says. “You just go in there and tell them whatever they need to hear.”
Roger straightens the materials in his lap, looks at their company logo on the front of the folder.
“How do you know what they want?”
“Just pay attention. I’ll run us through the first couple and then we’ll try you out on a nice, easy one.”
They drive through a yellow light and past a 7–11. They sit in indeterminate construction traffic for ten minutes and Roger points out billboards. Gus shortcuts through a mall parking lot and taps on the steering wheel waiting for someone to let him in.
“Y’know, I’m thinking about buying a pool table,” Roger says. “Not a super-nice one or anything. Just a, what is it, a six-and-a-half footer?”
Gus thinks about his apartment in Albuquerque: four white walls, a mattress and its tired boxspring on the floor, a lime-stained window overlooking the freeway. Everything else he owns is split between the suitcase in room 232 and a cedar trunk that’s sat in a Tucson storage unit for years now. Before the lawsuit, he had three thousand square feet in a decent neighborhood, a fiancée, a nice bit of credit card debt going for himself. One frustrated punch had cost him fifty-grand, everything in his life had followed the money out the door.
“A pool-table, huh?” Gus says. “Why not a bowling alley?”
[] [] []
They spend the morning going door-to-door through a four-story office building within earshot of Disneyland. Gus extolling the virtues of third-party technical support services, thoughtful customer liaisons, and the familial nature of their company to administrative assistants who mostly blink up at them and take Gus’s card.
They catch one middle-management type on his way back from the men’s room, but beyond that no one shows any tangible interest. After awhile, Gus lets Roger do the talking. He’s not bad: a little shake in his hand, but none in his voice. Some of the women show him an inch of pity, and he could work the sympathy angle if he wanted to.
In the office-suite for Inland Empire Solutions, Gus sits in a leather chair near the door as Roger talks to an admin behind her desk. Gus can see she’s deep into a game of solitaire on her computer, but she’s overlooking the move of a black six to a red seven.
“And, ma’am, the thing is, our services offer 24 hour, dedicated customer support,” Roger says, his collar darkening with sweat. “One of your guys is in here at two in the morning trying to beat that deadline, and you can raise us on the horn. The most important thing to us is the. . .uh. . . satisfaction of the customer.”
“Thank you,” she says, and files their brochure in a drawer. “I’ll let my bosses know and we’ll see what they say.”
“That’s all we’re asking. You have a good day now. Let me know if you have questions.”
They walk out and in the hallway Gus says he’ll take the last one, telling Roger he did alright and that it’s nerve-wracking for everybody at first. Their last call before lunch is a company that does something with prosthetics. Gus stands at the counter waiting for the admin to look up from the book she’s reading. He says hello, tries a joke. Finally, he snaps his fingers and she flinches, starts talking at them: “ — and what do you think he said to that? My son, my darling boy, says ‘mom, I’m going to go live with dad’. With his alcoholic old man and those damn drug-dealers on his street.” Gus and Roger back away quietly, like they’ve cornered a stray dog. “And of course there are going to be all kinds of women there, the wrong kind for a horny teenager to be around,” she goes on. They close the door behind them and as they walk down the hall, she can still be heard.
[] [] []
They get lunch and Gus cajoles Roger into drinking three beers to steel his nerves for their next move. In the car, Roger’s head lolls against the seat and he hums to replace the radio. They come to a stop on the 55 onramp, way ahead of them two semis are stalemated at the merge point.
“You’re a little drunk,” Gus says. “That’s the point.”
“We going to another office?” Roger burps. “I can’t go into another office.”
“No, better. But I got to tell you something first.” Gus lights a cigarette, wishing rental company alarms would shriek at him. “You can’t get caught up in caring about this. Not what we’re selling, or the people we’re selling it to. You can’t care if you make a sale, and you can’t care if you don’t.”
“But we have to keep the money coming in.”
“That’s the idea,” Gus says. The cigarette tastes like air-conditioning, corn syrup. “But the people we sell to are just marks. Front-men for companies that don’t live or die by what they buy from us. A sale might matter to our company, but we’ve got at best three more years like this. Nothing we can do, and no point in stressing it.”
“Not true, Gus.” Roger looks at him. “Company’s doing great, ‘s like. . .”
“The best quarter in five consecutive quarters or whatever, I know. Bullshit. Those numbers don’t mean anything. We dropped a service that was losing money. Anyway, look. . . none of it matters.”
“What does?”
The queue smarts up and goes around the trucks. The two Kentworths honk and inch forward, looking like arguing lovers who will plunge their tongues down each other’s throats at the first lull in the shouting. Gus and Roger hit the freeway at seventy and exit two miles later.
“The airport? We don’t even have our luggage or any of the — ”
“Doesn’t matter,” Gus says. “That’s our mantra today. Repeat it: ‘It doesn’t matter’.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Good.”
[] [] []
After buying the cheapest one-way tickets available, they stand looking at the flight monitors and Roger says he’s surprised at some of the cities that have airports: Winslow, Arizona; St. George, Utah; Ashland, Oregon. Gus decides on Terminal B, somewhere between gates 10 and 15.
“How do you know?”
“It’s like reading entrails,” Gus says with a smirk. “You have to learn the patterns, but it’s all sort of there.”
They sit in dead-grey chairs, surrounded by several dozen businessmen heading home or afield, three Midwestern sisters all sporting brand new hairdos, a young soccer team in blue sweatpants, and a cane-carrying retiree who stares up at the ceiling.
“We’re looking for marks,” Gus says. “I’ll point them out. The first one is mine, you just watch me.”
“Corporate’s going to pay for all this?”
“Just relax. It’s called a ‘Gus Little’,” he says. “This is how I pay for my frozen burgers.”
Gus spots one waiting to board at the next gate, maybe twenty feet away slowly typing into his laptop. Gus gestures toward the man and he and Roger watch. The guy’s suit fits poorly in the shoulders, buttons hang on their threads. The knot of his tie is loosened and his thin hair is pasted to his skull with sweat.
“You see, he didn’t think to take the tie off,” Gus says. “Means he’s still holding onto some dignity.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like if you lose a battle, you’ve got to bring your shield back to the chief. Gotta show him its scars.”
He motions for Roger to stay and slips between a wheelchair and a row of seats to walk in front of the mark. He stretches his legs and peeks at the man.
“Boy, I’m sure tired of traveling,” Gus says with a yawn.
“Tell me about it,” the man says, his typing uninterrupted. “San Diego this time of year. Everyone wants to drink margaritas, no one wants to do business.”
Gus fakes a laugh.
“Mind if I sit here?”
All the techniques are automatic now. Leaving a seat between them is selling, sitting right next to the guy would be cruising for a hand-job in the restrooms. The easiest way to be dishonest is to stray the minimum distance from the truth, so he chats with the guy, asking him idly what his business was in San Diego, where he’s headed to next.
“Tough industry,” Gus says. “Really gotta watch your ass, right?”
“Well, yeah. What’s your business?” the guy asks.
“Matter of fact,” Gus says, looking at his fingernails. “I help out folks like you.”
“Is that right?” the man says, and turns to him.
“Yeah, take your shop for example. Are you the headquarters or a remote office?”
“We’re the only office,” he says, and flips the laptop closed. “But we’re fairly large.”
“Oh, okay. Then this is simpler, but it would still . . .”
Then Gus hears a distinct jangle of keys. He turns his head and it’s this guy Charles Brown. Charlie fucking Brown, standing five feet in front of him smug and well-greased.
“Working a ‘Gus Little’, I see,” Charlie says. Of all the smarmy salesman and needling office managers Gus has come to avoid since the lawsuit, Charlie is the worst of both. He’s drank pitchers with him sitting in their suits around a hotel pool in Twentynine Palms, they watched a hurricane together on TV at SeaTac or PDX.
“So, anyway. . .” Gus turns back to the mark, but the laptop is flipped open and when Gus reaches in his jacket for a business card the man puts one hand up to wave him off.
Charlie is shaking his head, but Gus doesn’t look at him. He remembers when they drank four or five Jamesons in Elko, and Charlie told him how sometimes he jangles the keys in his pocket because it puts the person he’s talking to on infirm ground, jacks up the anxiety level so they make rushed decisions.
“What’s up, Charlie?” Gus says, looking out the window with a sigh. The woman at the podium announces that they are now seating WorldClassGoldElite passengers with Wings certification before all comers and the mark collects his things. Hopefully Roger was impressed.
“Working, of course,” Charlie says, smoothing the black shine of his hair, so recently dyed it looks blue at the ends. “Doing pretty well, I’m with BioAssistance now. BioAss, we call it. Not a bad gig.”
“Right on,” Gus says. He looks for Roger but the seat he left him in is empty. “You’ll have to tell me about it sometime. . .right now I’ve got to find my protégé.”
“Ah, the drunk guy,” Charlie says, like everyone is in on it. “He was looking a little peaked.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Charlie nods up the terminal to someplace called McHoppingbarley’s. Gus doesn’t see Roger among the suit-jackets, but from where he sits there’s no telling one drinker from the next. They all tolerate the crowd around them like they’re riding the train. Charlie looks at the people sitting nearby, then sits down next to Gus and turns his shoulder to the podium.
“You want to go underground?” he says, watching a pair of flight attendants walk through the terminal.
Gus starts to say something, but he’s cut-off by an announcement that the terror threat level is now Orange — travelers should yadda yadda and report suspicious activity. Charlie shrugs his shoulders and gestures out into the airport with his thumb in an appeal to the underground bar’s last remaining charm: the way it undermines this pretense of security, pokes fun at the millions of dollars laid-out for full-body scanners and bomb dogs and paunchy TSA agents in their important costumes — all of it ridiculous. But Gus says that he’s “sick of going down there” and the new guy isn’t ready for it.
“Tyler’s down there, you know,” Charlie says as he thumbs something into his phone. “He’s been in Finland for a year. He’s going to be tossing them back until the 799 to Minneapolis.”
“Well, when’s that?”
“Six-twenty I believe.”
“He’ll be dead drunk by then.”
“Yep.”
Gus gets up and they walk. The entrance to the underground bar is in an alley of sorts, a narrow hallway that connects two terminals like an illiterate: E to B. Charlie stands near the door to a janitor closet and fakes with his phone while he watches each end of the hall. Gus opens the door to the usual molding clutter of mops and wet floor signs and bottles of pale pink fluid. Brooms and mop-heads and extension cords hang from a rack. Charlie pushes on the back wall and a secret door grinds open to a staircase; two or three steps and then darkness, the damp smell of root cellars.
At the bottom of the steps, a bouncer opens the door. Five-six and droopy-eyed, he glares at them until Charlie says “we’re here to see your mother,” and they’re waved through. The room, like the bars in Houston and Des Moines and Denver and elsewhere, was built for storage: cinder-block walls, rust-colored struts supporting the airport above, a drain in the poured floor. There are ten men and women sitting on folding chairs around card tables, drinking alcohol out of paper cups from a quarter coffee-machine. Toward the back, liquor bottles are arranged on top of a credenza and the bartender is retrieving cans of beer from cabinets underneath. Charlie sits them down beside a poster for Southwest Airlines that’s been written over in magic marker so it reads: You are now free to booze about the country. Gus lights a cigarette from the candle on their table.
“Where’s Tyler?” he says, and looks at Charlie steady. Charlie has his jangling keys, Gus has his stare. He tilts his head so the shadow of his brow makes his eyes dark and uncertain.
“I don’t know,” Charlie says, smoothing his hair. “Maybe he went up to drain the lizard. Have I told you what BioAss does?”
“Charlie, I don’t give a shit. Where’s Tyler?”
Gus worked with Tyler for a couple years during his first sales job. Tyler loved what he called Gus’s ‘Sincerity Complex’ — too much of it, Gus understands now, too much believing in the product and telling the truth to people he was hawking it to. It made him look self-conscious, dismissable.
“You’ve seen those real dolls?” Charlie says. “Sex toys, basically. All articulated joints and fleshy tits, you seen those?”
“Charlie, c’mon.”
“He’ll be here, just chill out,” Charlie says, glancing at someone in the bar. “So, BioAss made a robot like that. Some Japanese mad scientist made this thing that can walk and talk, remember faces and, above all, process paperwork. Answer a phone better than an automated system, hell better than a lot of secretaries.”
“It’s a robot that, what, you can sleep with?” Gus stubs the cigarette out and slouches in his chair. There is no end to these gimmicks: artificial livers, software that can figure out who you should sue and how much money you stand to make, alarm systems that electrify your house like the Nautilus and leave burglars stunned and seizuring on your lawn.
“That’s not how we market it, of course,” Charlie says, again mashing his hair smooth. If they were playing poker, Gus would bet the pot against that tic. “But let’s just say that there’s a lot of interest in the ‘anatomically correct’ selling feature.”
The waitress comes over and Gus tells her he wants Jameson, neat. Then his phone rings and it’s Roger.
“Gus, Gus,” he slurs, the sounds of an airport fiesta behind him. “I’m with a VP from . . .hiccough . . .where was that again?”
Gus hits the red button and puts the phone back in his pocket.
“That your little wing?” Charlie says.
Gus nods and lights another cigarette.
The waitress brings their drinks and Charlie excuses himself to talk to an oilman at a table across the room. Texas oilmen work hard to look the part: cowboy hat and boots, a bolo, a belt-buckle the size of a dinner plate. Gus puts a hand to his face, lets the cigarette hang from his lips. Tyler isn’t going to show up and he’s stuck with these assholes until the drink is finished. But there’s no hurry, because the sooner he goes upstairs, the sooner he has to track Roger down and drag him out to the rental car, and the sooner he’s back panning for gold in some claustrophobic office building with nothing to look forward to but a hotel bed. He thinks about flying home right now, though his apartment is worse than a hotel: boxes instead of luggage, bare white walls, three fuzzy channels on TV.
A woman takes Charlie’s seat. Gus looks at her and then down at his drink. It’s Gwen, hair cropped and brown, wearing a Cavalli pants suit and jewelry that looks pallid in the weak light. She wears make-up now to smooth the acne scars along her chin and hide the sadness in her eyes, but Gus still sees it.
“Hi,” she says. “I see you’ve got the same drink.”
“How have you been?” he says.
They met eleven years ago, when Gus peddled high-end printers and fax machines. It wasn’t door-to-door like he’s doing now, he represented eight states and could barely keep up with the paperwork. He hustled in those days; failure used to make him nauseous, like liquor did when he was a kid.
Gwen managed the local office of a nonprofit. She was lonely and stressed and when Gus handed her his card, she flirted with him and Gus flirted right back. He took her out to dinner and talked and sold and they drank until they were back at his hotel and she was crawling all over him. There was nothing he wouldn’t do to make a sale.
“I’m divorced, as I’m sure you know,” she says.
“It was in your last e-mail.”
There were many e-mails and late-night phone calls. Gwen wasn’t on birth control, though that’s what she’d promised. She miscarried the child, and her husband knew it wasn’t his. Once, she claimed that she only regretted lying to him. In another e-mail, she called Gus a callous asshole. The entire time he knew he was supposed to feel something.
“Charlie said you were in the airport, sent me a text that he could get you down here.”
“I don’t know what more I can say to you.”
A week after sleeping with Gwen, feeling like a prostitute as he typed up her contract, Gus was fired for inconsistencies on a year-old expense report. He lost it. Flipped a table. Punched the litigious snot of an intern in the throat. The lawsuit was filed right around the time Gwen told him she was pregnant. A little while later, Gus’s fiancée decided she couldn’t marry a man who was broke.
“Things happened. They’re over now. . .and you seem to be doing well,” Gus says.
“No, it’s not that.”
“Then what?”
“It’s just sometimes I feel like I should apologize to you. I feel how you looked then: confused, worn-out . . .I’m sorry for the shit that I put on you afterward.”
“It was just business, Gwen. Bad business maybe, but nothing more than that.” He looks away from her. Those eyes like cut glass, permanently moist as though she’s just waiting to be alone so she can weep and pound her fists.
“Just business?” Gwen says, her chair skittering backward.
It’s the same question Gus totes through airports and packs in the back of his rental car and trudges up stairwells with. All of it, just business, nothing more. Just business waking up in Albuquerque once every two weeks to fire up his computer and print out boarding passes. Just business getting slow-drunk at T.G.I.Fridays for the third straight night and narrowly resisting the urge to shake the buttons off the waitress’s suspenders. He looks at Gwen, and for the first time sees her as something other than an agent in a botched transaction.
Gus’s phone hums like a pet insect. He puts out his cigarette and Gwen watches him with her mouth open to speak. It’s Roger, again, but the voice on the other end is someone else. He sounds bald and bespectacled and patient.
“Are you in the airport?” the voice says.
“Yes.”
“You should come collect your partner.”
“What happened?”
“He’s asleep in this booth at the Tequilarium, trying to sell Lord knows what,” the voice says, a sound like he’s prodding Roger with a stick. “I saw him make a call and I thought it was the best chance.”
“Thank you,” Gus says. “Five minutes. You don’t have to wait.”
Gus hangs up and stands, fishes a twenty from his pocket and drops it on the table. Across the room, Charlie is finishing a shot with the oilman and he catches Gus’s eyes over his fake laugh. He and Charlie are of the same tribe, someone at a distance could not tell them apart.
“Your just going to go?” Gwen says, her mascara turning to blobs on her lashes. “So much business now, and traveling. It just gets so damn quiet at night that I can barely stand it. How do you keep yourself like that? How do you remember who you are?”
“I don’t know any other way to be,” Gus says. He swallows hard. “Good bye, Gwen.”
“I just thought you could help me figure this out.”
“I don’t know anything,” Gus says, and leans on the back of the chair, “you set yourself in a direction, you know? Separate from all the others you could have taken, train yourself to do it well. And when you get pushed off course, there you are. A stranger lost in the woods.”
He walks away without change, nods to the bouncer, and stumbles up the steps. He imagines Gwen following after him — demanding that he cut the bullshit, that he say he felt something the time they were together. “Nothing, jesus christ nothing,” Gus says, and pushes out of the closet.
The brightness of the airport startles him, clean white like the surface of a planet with no atmosphere. His legs are heavy and he leans against the wall breathing hard. It feels like the sweaty, empty-lunged moments just before he punched that kid. He takes a long time walking out of the hallway.
The Tequilarium is in Terminal C — this by déjà vu. Heading in that direction, he sees travelers gliding along the conveyor, flustered by flight announcements and PDAs, children who will not keep their hands off the glass. And then the gauntlet of gift shops and magazine shops and coffee shops. The classy pub separated from the sports bar by a tribe of nomadic apes. That’s how they all look now, a crowd just smart enough to stand upright and file onto airplanes and respond to commands. Any one of these people can be persuaded into anything. He walks behind two women in niqab gliding ghostly on their hidden feet, so dark black they’re like bits cut from the scene. He could sell them dildos if he was willing to do whatever it took. The thought makes him choke — he cuts across the stream of travelers and dry-heaves twice over a trash can, a feeling like organs are coming loose in his ribcage.
Soon enough, he’s standing in the Tequilarium, looking down at Roger slumped in a vinyl booth. Gus says his name, Roger coughs and waves him away and continues to snooze. He smacks him, hard, and Roger’s eyes shake open and Gus pulls him up from the seat by his arm.T hey follow the cartoons to the parking garage and Roger is practically asleep on his feet, talking about a big sale he nearly had and rifling in his pockets. He has to lean on Gus to walk. When they make it to the car, Gus belts him in. On the freeway, Roger sings and snores and finally sleeps. Gus exits and drives past a 7–11 with a pueblo roof, someone in a Statue of Liberty costume waving a sign for Free Tax Consultation, the construction site of a new Red Robin. At a red light, a pock-faced Mexican peddles oranges from a yard refuse bag, standing gaunt and indifferent in the burnt grass and cigarette butts of the curb. Gus rolls down the window to let the smog in, it tastes like phlegm and aspirin.
Gus shoulders Roger into the hotel’s elevator and props him up against the back wall. Roger belches and says: “Good times, pal, you taught me everything I know.” They make it out of the elevator and go to Gus’s room. At the door, Gus pries the plastic No Smoking sign off with his fingernails and then helps Roger inside and eases him into the tub. He lights a cigarette, pulling deeply on it, letting out a slow roll of smoke and then sucking it back in. He yanks the shower massager from the slot, turns the cold water on, and sprays. “It’s cold, it’s cold,” Roger says, rolling side-to-side in the tub, laughing. Gus tips his ash onto the No Smoking sign. He soaks Roger’s jacket and pants, cleaning off the booze smell, trying to sober him with the cold. Roger’s teeth chatter.
“I lied to you, Roger,” he says. “Everything matters. Every little thing you do matters.”
He turns the shower off and leaves Roger to take care of himself. Back out in the room, he sits on the bed and smokes and watches the TV he left on in the morning. Local news muted, a carefully pretty woman mouthing whatever as she stands in front of a crime scene. Next week is Spokane, he thinks. Phoenix after that. There isn’t enough commission in the whole goddamned world.
This story originally appeared in The Underground