Kevin Allison's True Stories: Living for the City
A comedy article
by Kevin Allison  808  2
07/22/2009 07:55 PM 1100 views
|
|
After my freshman year at NYU, everyone I knew went home for the summer. I didn't want to. And not just because Cincinnati was Cincinnati. I wanted to prove I could become a New Yorker. I wanted to show I was ready for the "real world." So I became a door-to-door dictionary salesman.
Follow our foolproof method and make $300 a day! the ad said. Twenty years later, I still stop short over this kind of ad. Wanna make $90 an hour just glancing at clouds?! How do they know?
The company was called American Publications International. Or General Systems Worldwide. No one could remember. An unshaven, ponytailed man in his thirties named Frank trained about a dozen of us losers in mismatched suits. He smelled like he used his pockets as ashtrays. Frank expected you to suspend your disbelief. And why not? You were the kind of belief suspender who'd answered his ad.
And God said, "No slouching!"
"Before I show what's in the suitcase, I want to show how you talk about it," he said.
You see that all over. If you want to sell a bucket, do as much of your spiel as you can before letting on what you're selling is just a bucket. The customer may forget to look for holes and ask the one question you don't want to answer: "Does it hold water?"
Frank showed us a cinderblock of a book, said it was so current it defined "Michael Jackson," and chanted his mantra, "It's a Webster's!"
The word is in the public domain. The Library of Congress wouldn't care if I published a journal of bowel movements and called it a Webster's.
*******************************
"This guy!" the female one said. "He wants to sell us a dictionary!"
My first two customers -- twits, probably Staten Islanders. They didn't so much laugh as bark.
I plowed ahead, "But if you use it twelve times a year for ten years, that's just fifty cents per use!"
"He's reading a script!"
The male one grabbed it and read. "...and don't forget -- it's a Webster's!"
On the bright side, they may have been crushed by a falling fuselage the next day.
I was an awful salesman. Weeks went by without a sale. It didn't help that anyone could slip out to Barnes and Noble and get a real dictionary for a fourth the price. One day I followed our manager Frank into a deli to ask for help. I was desperate. I was broke.
"You're too big on the script," he said, meaning the foolproof method. "You gotta feel for someone's weakness and scratch at that." A fly landed at his nostril. Frank didn't notice. Or couldn't muster the energy to care. "Also, you make that first sale, everything changes. You feel that rush, that power. You won't wanna get off the ride."
Frank couldn't have been the master seller he said he was. He stank, he mumbled, he let flies crawl up his nose. I'd buy the guy a blood transfusion before paying him for a book. But I wanted this to work. A real-world New Yorker wouldn't quit.
A more attractive Frank.
The next day, I knocked on a door in a cramped and crumbling building on 28th Street. An Arab in a turban opened it. He gave off the impression he'd never once washed his armpits. He welcomed me.
This man's office was the size of a dumpster. And it moved. My entrance sent waves of roaches streaming down walls, over desks and, an image that haunts me to this day, out of his toaster oven. There were so many of them and so little space, they weren't so much hiding as switching positions, a mini marching band.
The place was filled with stacks and stacks and stacks of porn. This guy was a video distributor. Also he coughed like someone with something horribly contagious.
As it turned out, here finally was the one who wanted a dictionary. That meant I would have to come back to the shimmying dumpster to deliver it.
I didn't feel that rush, that power. I didn't not wanna get off the ride.
And just as I was realizing this, just as I was exiting to the street, something awful happened.
The giant window of a florist's shop exploded. A skinny young black kid came bursting through the frame with all the glass shards, airborne. He landed on his back on the cement. The florist, an old Eastern European, leaned out the broken window he'd hurled this kid through. He had a broomstick. He beat the kid on the ground.
I didn't know what the kid had done, but I doubt he deserved to be bludgeoned on the sidewalk before he could get his bearings from being thrown through a window.
When someone hurls you through a window, try not to land on this.
I stood there paralyzed in the searing wet heat. In a mismatched suit with a few dozen dollars to my name. I felt for the kid. And I saw the rage and fear in the florist's face. I felt for him too.
I was looking at real-world New Yorkers. And I was one of them.
Do you have a "Living for the City" story -- a tale of survival in a dog eat dog town? Submit it as a ZUG Article and title it "Living for the City: _____________." You might be invited to contribute to my upcoming podcast of dangerous stories, daringly told called RISK! The first season of RISK! will include Marc Maron, Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter, David Wain, Janeane Garofalo, Keith Powell, Rachel Dratch and more. Click here to submit your story!
|
|
|
Like This? Rate It!
|
|
Hilarious
5 votes
4.2
/live?func=new_user&msgid=1833767
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
0 votes
0.0
/live?func=new_user&msgid=1833768
Clean Shaven Nipples 2,111  5
07/22/2009 08:09 PM
Seeing Mr. Zappa on a toilet makes me wonder if that's the toilet seat he got "it" from.
|
| |
|
|
|
0 votes
0.0
/live?func=new_user&msgid=1833771
Shell Belle 31,046 7
07/22/2009 08:36 PM
Is Allison your real last name? That's my maiden name and I'm from Ohio too. Maybe we're related. That would be scary. For you, I mean.
|
| |
|
|
|
0 votes
0.0
/live?func=new_user&msgid=1833773
dacheat 2,330 0
07/22/2009 08:44 PM
Most of my real world big city stories involve dodging bullets and coroners who don't want to pick up a dead body off the street("What's the rush? Where is he gonna go?"), people taking a Shakespeare on the sidewalk... I suppose if I wasn't so numbed by it all, I could make it funny.
|
| |
|
|
|
Funny
1 votes
3.0
/live?func=new_user&msgid=1833966
John Hargrave 116,547 19
07/23/2009 02:19 PM
Oh man, I almost took a crappy sales job like this when I was in college. I was in a similar training room with similar flunkies, only this sales trainer was super-enthusiastic.
"How do you feel?" he would ask, loudly, exposing teeth that were entirely too white.
"Great!" people would say.
"When I ask you how you feel, I want you to say FANTASTIC!" he would holler.
Then he would go around the room, asking each person to introduce themselves. He would begin, though, by saying, "How do you feel?"
"Fantastic!" you would shout.
After the training, he followed up on everyone by phone to tell them whether they "made the cut" or not. (I think everyone except toothless mongoloids made the cut.) When he called me on the phone he said, "How you feel?"
"Good, thanks," I said, not thinking.
"NO!" he screamed. "YOU FEEL FANTASTIC!"
Still, he welcomed me into the sales organization, showing that feeling fantastic was not actually one of the most important criteria for being on his team. Fortunately, I declined his offer.
To this day, I have no memory of what the product was that he was selling. Only that he felt fantastic.
|
| |
|
|
|
Hilarious
1 votes
4.0
/live?func=new_user&msgid=1833970
Bill the Squirrel 25,396 8
07/23/2009 03:58 PM
To this day, I have no memory of what the product was that he was selling. Only that he felt fantastic.
Where did you feel him?
|
|
|
|
Share on your site: