7593 My Dream of Being a Traveling Salesman

I have finally written long enough that plot points seem to be clashing one another. Ugh!  I almost quit about three times today and had to take ice cream and dinner breaks.  Hot Fudge-yeah!

6180 My Dream of Being a Traveling Salesman

The Salesman has a meeting to get to. Phew! I still have some catching up to do but I am determined. Writing fast makes one want to keep at it, but momentary pauses to look at what the heck is going on seem to help.

4933, My Dream of Being a Traveling Salesman

I find out about this last night and am plugging away.  Behind but can catch up if I hurry.

My Dream of Being a Traveling Salesman Chap. 2

I started this whole thing tonight and got two chapters done-whew!

Right at 2800 words which is well behind the mark but at that clip I could theoretically catch up if I keep pace.

Andy

And there I stand.  My few remaining hairs parted across the top of my scalp as I enter the meeting room at the Barstow Ramada Inn.  Outside, a westbound freight rambles onward towards the classification yards.  Onward to the coast goes its manifest, its assortment of containers split up and shipped out to a world of commerce.
I have the Geneva catalog tucked under my arm and purchase order forms and several ball-points at hand.  This is the moment where I thrive, the sales conference.  Face to face with the buyers.  Let them chew up and spit out my chum in the water.  Let them say that American-made is a thing of the seventies and an extra nickel for a piece of pipe is going to kill overhead.  But I have sales to make and a craps game to get to.  I have purchase orders to ink.  I have Tums in my pocket, just in case.
It’s not a bad size crowd for summer in Barstow.  You can’t blame them for wanting to come into the air-conditioning.  The Ramada is a nice place.  They turn out a nice spread.  In the mornings they serve breakfast and coffee (it’s a bit much for a salesman like me, but maybe someday).
Behind the Geneva sign I stand.  “Made in the USA.”  The motel owners and fast-foodies give me a glance.  It is hard to start a conversation about plumbing even if you want to give it away.  Nobody likes to talk much about the shitter, I find.  It is almost as bad as having a dentist’s booth and giving a “root canal” demonstration.  I find it is helpful to have a few M&M’s and Hershey Kisses in the booth.  Usually just about everyone comes up and opens a pack and has to stop and eat for at least ten to fifteen seconds.  And while they are eating, bingo, their mouth is closed, just the time to ask a few casual questions.
You don’t want to come out and say, “Is your ‘S’ trap leaking?  Do you have shit all over the floor of the men’s room so bad that you can smell it from the urinals?  Not exactly what you want to ask someone when he has a mouthful of M&M’s.  Potential clients are like marble.  You want to selectively start to find where you want to carve.  Where you want to make the precise first tap with your hammer.  You don’t just want to pound with a mallet by saying, “Do you see naked people because the shower curtains are falling off?”  Slowly but surely you build rapport.
“How is that chocolate?  I kinda like the ones with nuts myself.  Didn’t care too much when they started adding all of those purple and blue ones.  Do you like dark chocolate better than milk chocolate?  I can get that next time if you’d like.”  Right there in that sentence or two, you learn if the client likes added extras-the nuts.   You learn whether they like things changing or staying the same-when they added a bunch of colors to M&M’s.  You learn whether they have sophisticated tastes-dark or milk chocolate. You also let them know that you will be a customer servant by letting them know that you will get dark chocolate if they prefer it to milk chocolate.  You can learn a lot about sales from a bag of M&M’s.  It sure beats coming out and beating someone over the head by talking about busted pipes, piss covered floors and “S” traps.
But M&M’s or not, I gotta warm the client up, but then when they’re done chewing and I have them in my hand, I gotta start talking fixtures.  Let’s face it, I’m not an M&M salesman.  If I were, I’d be working at Seven-Eleven and I would ten-to-one sell Marlboros instead.  Chocolate is nice, but nicotine is where the money is.
But again, slowly, not, “Are people tripping over leaking urinals and sink-grime.”  Build off of the Hershey Kiss momentum.  “So, where are you guys located?  You own the Wendy’s in Barstow, Victorville and Apple Valley?  I see.  I had lunch there yesterday.”  You always want to at least be a sport and play the ball back that you sent some business their way.  Try and know the town a little.  “That’s the Wendy’s across from the Seventy-Six Station over there, huh?”
“Yeah, back when it was a garage we used to get mechanics all of the time during their lunches and twenties.  Now business pretty much dried up.”
“That’s really the shits.  OSHA really hurt a lot of those full service gas stations, huh?  They’ve all turned into a bunch of mini-marts with pumps.”
“I’ll say.  Don’t know what’s going to get this economy back on its feet again.”
Whew, now is not exactly the time to say, ‘I don’t know, maybe overpriced plumbing fixtures for your bathrooms?  That sure would get the economy going again, huh?’  Once again, build off of the M&M momentum.
Slowly.  “I had the Baconator.  That sure is a good sandwich.  It goes good with a Frosty.  I like chocolate Frosties, myself, never saw much the need for that Vanilla one.  You guys ever going to get that Monterey Ranch Combo back?”
“I donno?  They always give it to us for a limited time.”
“You see I had that sandwich about six years ago with my girl up in Sacramento, and she said that Wendy’s was going places the moment that you guys got that sandwich.  Put it with fries and a Coke and you got yourself a square meal.  I could eat that a coupl’a days a week.”  Slowly but surely we get to the plumbing.
“I went to this Wendy’s up in up by Sacramento, where I am from.  You ever been up there?”
“I don’t get to Northern California that much.”
“Well This Wendy’s one time had a stopped up toilet.  Two college students, it seemed had been flushing paper towels down the crapper instead of toilet paper.  The paper towels got stuck in and inferior ‘S’ Trap.  Anyway, for a whole day, no one could use the can.  It ended up costing them four-grand to fix the toilet, but another four-grand in lost revenue, not to mention future business.  My mom, if she ever goes to a restaurant where the can is dirty, she pretty much won’t go back.  Would you ever want that to happen to you?  I know that just about all of your customers are based on regulars who come to you day-in, day-out, year after year.  You really wouldn’t want to offend anyone, would you?”
“Well I sure wouldn’t at that.”
“That’s why you want to buy American-made fixtures and “S” traps.  I know a businessman like yourself is hurting at this moment, and every penny you can save is by far a penny earned.  One place, however, that you don’t want to start saving and earning pennies, and I am talking pennies, is in the bathroom, you get me?
“I see what you mean.”
“You take this ‘S’ trap.  A cheap import costs about five cents less.  The problem is the import is prone to breaking.  They don’t stress test the imports the way domestic factories do.  If you put our trap under your toilet, for a mere nickel, you have the confidence that if the toilet should sway, the trap will not be compromised.  Do you want to compromise your whole bathroom and your restaurant’s integrity over a cheap five-cent plumbing decision?”
“I sure wouldn’t want to do that.”
“Are there any places in your men’s or women’s rooms that are leaking?  Places where the floors get wet?  By the sinks or urinals, for instance?”
“I don’t know, I don’t really go in there that much.”
“When was the last time you had a plumber inspect your bathrooms?”
“Well, the health-inspector comes.”
“Not just the health-inspector, an actual plumber.  You should make sure that the toilets work properly and that all of your fixtures are in place.  At Geneva we want to make sure that your business is not compromised by nickels and dimes worth of plumbing parts.”
“I see what you mean.”
“How about if I have a certified plumber come and make sure that all of your valves are tightened and see if any need replacing?”
“Well business hasn’t been that good, how much will it cost.”
“It shouldn’t be more than a half-hour’s worth of his time per restaurant and maybe a dollar’s worth of valves at the most.  Unless he should find something big that needs replacing, such as a toilet.  But if he should, wouldn’t you want to know that your toilet was about ready to break.  Wouldn’t you want to have the surgery right before instead of right after?”
“I see what you mean?”
“So how about next Monday?  Does that work for you.”
“How about Tuesday, 9 am before we open.”
“That will work.  I’ll get the name of our local plumber, was it Jack?”
“Yes, Jack Killington.”
“Nice to have met you Jack.”

My Dream of Being a Traveling Salesman cont.

It is a desolate land, the high desert.  Punctuated with the Joshua tree, the Mojave’s life form shows by its shape and size a definition of the harshness.  In the sky above me half a century before, Chuck Yeager first cracked the sound barrier in his X-1.
Out of the ranks of these daredevils, the gritty pioneers were picked to man the Apollo flights and land the first men upon the moon.  Kennedy’s promise to land a man safely upon the face of the moon was delivered under the watch of Richard Nixon.  Fate can be a cruel and kind master.
But I gotta get to Barstow.  I got to sell some plumbing and shower curtain rings.  Across the desert, a lone BNSF freight speeds westward towards the Tehachapi Range.  That is quite a site, the largest windmill generation set-up in the country.  Words can’t even describe it.  Go to you-tube or something and google “Tehachapi Windmills.”  There’s something like two-hundred windmills facing the canyon where all of this wind blows; all of the windmills beat slightly out of unison.  It is almost like an orchestra or something.  It is like watching violins playing.  That just sounds stupid, I know.  As I said, I can’t really describe it.  You either gottta drive three hundred miles into the middle of nowhere and see it for yourself, or look it up on that you-tube thing.  I am sure its there.

When one approaches Barstow from the west, the town is a vast funnel of three of California’s major rail lines.  The town was built for, exists for, and will die for, the railroad.  If someone uses one of my shower curtains, there is a good chance they are on railroad business.  If they take a dump at a Wendy’s on a toilet with an “S” trap that I sell to a plumber, there is a good chance that they are there on railroad business.  Railroads bring good business to good towns.
My good suit, my only suit, sits in a bag on the back seat of the Malibu.  I lay it flat so as I don’t have to iron it.  I dress up pretty sharp in a suit.  Even though I am bald as the day I was born, you put me in a cheap suit, and I am a guy who can sell some plumbing fixtures.
I figure if I close four small to mid-size accounts or two large accounts or any combination there-of, I should do okay.  If I do any better than that, I might be able to take a week off when I get back up to Sacramento.  Heck, I might even be able to go to Reno and shoot some craps and turn what I make into a little bit of a bank roll.  I don’t mess around with Vegas; that is just overpriced booze and overpriced women.  You can get a cheap hotel, cheap breakfast, and nice people up in Reno.

My Dream of Being a Traveling Salesman cont.

I figure gas is about a hundred bucks.  I had figured two hundred when calculating the whole thing out, but the hedge-fund guys seemed to smile upon us this time.  It seems that Boon Pickens and his gang wanted to further our taste for oil a bit further and drop the stuff back down to $2.50.  I guess they were scared that us shower ring guys would just pick up a phone and call in our sales versus getting into a Malibu and driving the grommets down in person.
I got a room at the Route 66 Motor Lodge for forty-bucks a night/one-sixty a week.  You can’t beat that in today’s world.  Heck, the KOA costs forty bucks.  Don’t ask me how I know.  Lady’s in tube tops complaining that they don’t have menthols down at the Seven-Eleven.  Whew, I’ll take a weekly one-twenty motel with neon shining in over the dog barking shit-hole of a trailer park.  I don’t want to piss at two-thirty am and have to worry about a shitter that’s full and have to get on my hands and knees with a flashlight and find the brown water first.  Believe me, you don’t want to do gray water before brown.