Birth of a Salesman

            Everyone thinks about their own excrement, their shit, at some point right, that’s normal? He thought so, but he also worried that he thought about it too much, expelling that which lay dormant and rotting inside him. Sometimes it made him sick to his stomach just to think that there it lay, his shit, curled up inside of his own body, which he liked to think was beautiful, pure.

            He recalled Alfred Lambert, unable to distinguish the tiny yet constant mechanical shakings of a cruise ship from those he suspected to originate from the frail flesh he inhabited.

            “Get that bitch!” his manager mouthed at him, wide eyed, bald, and corpulent like some giant sloth that found an Armani suit at the Nordstom Rack and decided to play at humanity. He was on the phone with an old woman, deeply in debt, flailing in utter futility, trying to make money on the internet. He smiled and nodded in response, feeling as if the shit that so curdled his stomach, that he so wished never existed, came rushing involuntarily from his flapping maw. He imagined the Dutch boy pulling his finger from the dyke so that he could snatch dollars from drowning men’s pockets.

             “I completely understand,” he said not without truth and not without pain, “in this industry there are millions of sharks and it's almost impossible to differentiate a predator from a shepherd. But rest assured I am here to lead you to the promised land. I am neither Google nor God, but I am a prophet, a disciple, a true believer, and you need only to be baptized in the holy waters of my company’s expertise to see the light and be rewarded, nay saved, by the most penitent and godly of man’s creations: money.”

            He imagined he could see her clawed hands grasp and scrape across a plastic vial of pain medication as a hollow rattle sounded over the phone and he heard the grunt and swish of her guttural spasmodic gulp. Two very different feelings welled up inside of him, both overridden by shame.

            He felt like Johann Tetzel, drunkenly peddling his indulgences to the weak and afraid and dreaming.

            Yet he also felt like Martin Luther: sick to death of hearing drunk old Johann’s lies emanate from the courtyard below. He was obsessed with shit too, Luther. He used to hallucinate fiendish battles in the silent flickering light of his privy. Satan, Beelzebub, the Fallen Angel would appear before him, challenge him in the darkness, and he would physically act out his mental conflicts. The fiend would tempt him and when Luther would resolutely reject his advances, the Dark One inside of him would take hold of that which Luther hated most about himself and fling it in Satan’s face. In short, Luther used to have shit-fights with his hallucinative devil. Sometimes raging, stooping, and flinging until his compatriots would find him whimpering, crouched yet victorious, in a room essentially painted in and therefore reflecting, Luther’s internal motions. Men of God sometimes struggle the most furtively through physical existence. Augustine never forgave himself for stealing a pear. From a tree no less.

            “Ah’m not sure, Ah’ve been down this road befohe and Ah’ve always lost moneh to smooth talkahs like you. You sound lahk a nice young man, but Ah really need this to work. Mah husband doesn’t know that Ah’m tryin’ to do this...”

            She just needed a little push, he could feel it, and he hated that he could feel it, manipulate this woman if he wanted to. He hated feeling powerful.

            She was Geraldine. 78 year old grandmother of five with a severely damaged sciatic nerve and possibly an opioid addiction. A sweat-heart. A gentle and kind soul with a southern drawl to her warbling and buzzard-like voice. Her daughter, also an addict, had left her grandson Calib, three, at a friends house who had subsequently refused to relinquish the child to his grandmother after his mother’s disappearance. Geraldine picked up the phone in the midst of this crisis, two weeks earlier, and in her vulnerability, had reached out to him who sells. He reached back with a gloved hand.

            The crisis was over and the boy returned, but she remembered he-who-sell’s kindly words and steady voice and felt, out of grandmotherly gratitude, that she owed him something. She was tired and she wanted to be convinced, to lay back and let the water rush over her aching body.

            He knew it and he hated it.

            “Look at all that you’ve been through, all that you’ve been taken for. Isn’t it time that someone took care of you, Geraldine? Looked after you? Let’s just be honest with each other, Geraldine, you don’t know anything about this business. You NEED our help. I could sit here and show you examples all... day... long... but what it really comes down to is whether or not you trust me. Do you trust me, Geraldine?”

            This question rolled of out his mouth greasily and settled, stinking, in the silence between them. Of course she trusted him, he had helped her, out of the kindness of his heart, with the Calib situation. Call the police he said, YOU are in the right he said. He validated her and built her up and now he was calling her out. She had no idea how to run this business, she truly did need help. If her husband found about her failed investments... she had to try something and felt a connection to this spirited and verbose young man (on the line).

            “Of couhse I do, hunneh, but that sum of moneh...”

            The sloth, always listening, rubbed his hands together greedily, eyes bugging wide. He felt the sloth’s warm breath on the back of his neck as he muted his headset during Geraldine’s side of the conversation. The sloth clamped its claws on his shoulder in a gesture that he guessed was supposed to be encouraging. He had to fight back a shiver. “You got this cunt!” the sloth drooled, a look of admiration in its eyes that made him sick, “YOU did it! Now slam her, fuck her into submission!” Everyone looked up at him with a mix of jealousy and wonder as the sloth gesticulated wildly about his accomplishment. He felt like both puppet and master, a marionette pulling his own strings, somehow both in and out of control.

            “It’s not the money, Geraldine,” he made a point of saying her name as often as possible, “It’s what that money buys. True, you’re right, this is an investment, and I won’t lie to you, it has its risks. But think about the rewards! Remember the websites I showed you? How successful they’ve been? Don’t you want to own something like that?” Silence. Time to switch gears and re-frame the same thought, to drape it in different words. “Look, listen to me, Geraldine. I’ve showed you who you’re competing against and I’ve showed you the technology, our technology, that they’re using. Do you feel that you are adequately equipped to compete with these kinds of businesses? Now I cannot, and you know this Geraldine, promise that you WILL, FOR CERTAIN, become rich, but what I can tell you, and you know this too, Geraldine, is that what you have now will surely fail.”

            Alfred became so obsessed with his own bowel movements that he would escape to the bathroom after every meal in order to begin the process of “evacuation”. He would struggle helplessly and alone in the most degrading and necessary and sobering of acts. As Tom Sternberg knew, most dreadfully, nothing proves that you have a body, are alive and will also die, like taking a shit. Alfred would sit there, shaking feebly under physicality itself, solipsistically defending his right to exist while his family (although not physically of course) deserted him. Refusing to participate in Alfred’s courtship with death. It reminded them that they too would someday die and they were afraid to associate, genuinely, with someone who they perceived as being weak, exhibiting the symptoms of mortality. Unable to recognize that in his vulnerability, he was the courageous one, a hero.

            He felt like Alfred, a soul, surrounded by bodies using bodies.

            “Ah know that mah current investment has no hope of turnin’ a profit, Ah know that now, Ah was foolish. But the prospect of makin’ that mistake again is unbearable. Without mah daughtuh heah Ah am now responsible foah the youngin’s. Ah need to save moneh in case they get sick, fo' theah educations, fo' healthy food so they can grow up strong. Ah need money foah Calib’s asthma medication, he’s such a weak chald... Ah think his Mama musta been usin’ durin’ pregnancy...”

            Soft tears could be heard making their crooked paths down Geraldine’s parchmentlike skin, making trails in the dust. THIS was holy water, pure love spilling from this brimming woman’s eyes. His heart broke as he continued, hyenas cackling around him.

            “Geraldine I completely understand, and when I’m telling you about our program, about the services we can provide you, Geraldine, I’m thinking of Calib, I’m thinking of your children and grandchildren. Don’t you want them to be able to attend the best colleges in the nation? To have every luxury afforded them? For them to live the charmed lives of the affluent and the elite? What I’m offering you here Geraldine, is freedom. Freedom from debt, freedom from your husband’s scorn, and freedom from anxiety. Wouldn’t it be nice to feel secure? Listen Geraldine, I’ve been doing this for many years-”

            He hadn’t.

            “-and I’ve had hundreds of successful clients-”

            He hadn’t.

            “-and when I go home to my wife and three year old daughter-”

             Neither of which existed

            “-I feel successful, that I have truly helped people. In other words, Geraldine, I sleep like a baby-”

             He didn’t.

            “-because I DO NOT sell ANYONE anything unless I KNOW, in my heart that it is going to work. Do ya feel me Geraldine?” He plastered a big smile on his face, exuding an emotion he did not feel. Willing her to understand him through language alone, fearing that she might identify his insincerity, that words might not be as powerful as reality. But reality is forged in language and she never had a chance against the world he created for her.

            At some point during his speech he had left his chair and begun pacing, steadily back and forth as far as the length of cord attached to his headset would allow. Tethered there to his desk like a dog on a chain.

            The sloth came back, waddling seductively in the interim. “You’ve got her, don’t let her go,” it wheezed through emphysema ridden lungs, a pack of Paul Mauls visible through it’s finely-made shirt pocket, “Stick it back in, and finish!”. The sloth looked out onto the floor with its hands on his shoulder’s again. He looked out too and saw his team looking back at him, encouraging him, ravenous.

            He imagined slicing Geraldine into little cutlets and grilling her over a Grill Master’s Barbecue. Sprinkling on some A-1 steak sauce. Eating her with his feet kicked up and washing her down with a Pabst Blue Ribbon. All the while she thanked him.

            In the second’s of silence that ensued after his tirade, he wiped his mouth, smoothed his shirt and sat back down. Each little lie changed him slightly. He told himself that the sloth made him do it, which was partially true, but sometimes lies flew out of his mouth by their own accord. Which, he supposed, was his. Each lie was a brick in the wall that separated him from other people, mortared together in human excrement. He watched himself pick up a brick (destroying a road in the process) and place it snuggly into the wall while he repeated, “Do ya FEEL me, Geraldine?”

          “Well, Ah don’t have enough in mah bank account...” she responded shakily and he cut her off, rolling in her vulnerability. “If financing is your only problem, Geraldine, then we have no problem.” He chuckled amiably and smiled, as he had done many times after this particular line. She joined in the laughter hesitantly but genuinely. “Ever heard of ‘credit-cards’?” he said the words ‘credit cards’ slowly, enunciating childishly, cutting the words off at their ends and making them sharp. He felt voluminous in a two-dimensional world, feeling a feeling he felt had no right to exist. Like he was trying to make a noun past tense. He saw the inanimate rebel against the animate and physical laws unraveling like DNA strands being torn asunder. He wondered what would happen if he just shit in his suit, right there in front of everybody.

             “Ah do have several cahds but no single cahd has enough to front th--”

            “Well, we’ll just have to spread it over a few of ‘em then, won’t we?” He was using a technique called ‘assuming the sale’ and Geraldine was not immune to his linguistic trickery. He started saying things like, “You and I are gonna have fun together, Geraldine,” and “I can’t wait to get started on this project,” and “One day you and I are gonna look back on this day, over a nice glass of wine (after you’ve flown out to see me) as the beginning of your success.”  By describing her 'success' as if it had already happened, by placing her in the position of looking back upon her business, by using words like “started”, “going”, and “after”, he manipulated her into believing, at some level, that it had already happened. That it was already out of her hands and firmly into his. Her’s shaking, claw-like and unsure, his firm and stoic. He made her think of him as a great friend and confidant. He was selling himself.

            Yambo Bodini wondered at his own shit, reveled in that primal act of creation that endows man with an ancient contentedness. The feeling of having past, made it to the other side, broken some barrier and achieved something. Ideas have a gestation periods as well, and if you use words incorrectly, for the wrong purpose, they are liable to loiter within you, stagnant and rotting, your mind unable to process their significance. He thought of Yambo as he built his wall, brick by brick, having passed through nothing, his excrement returning to, and then exiting through, its origin.

            The sloth was becoming impatient and he could feel its hot tobacco breath on his neck again, coaxing, rubbing his shoulders in slow concentric circles as if to mesmerize or channel. Willing him to make the sale and using him as much as he used her. He felt a pressure on the top of his head, as if he were being pushed to fellate.

            “Do not become a statistic, Geraldine, let me helllllp you.”

            Sweet silence, in which he closed his eyes in lament, prevailed for several mechanical seconds. His head hurt so he reached for a regenerative sip of black coffee, its influence already perceptible, at least to him, by the twitch in his lidded left eye. He despised his body. He looked around his office, at voices on the phone, knew that these were a group of people who hated mirrors but owned many. Who had big voices but tiny hearts (duplicitous taints). And who were rotting on the inside.

            “Ah found my cahds, young man.” She was weeping now, unabashedly. “But Ah really don’t know if we should proceed...”. She was right: it was a procedure; he was dissecting her, separating her from her good sense like some kind of mad scientist.

            The sloth seemed to be inside his head, not to be whispering but to communicate directly with him like Berkeley’s God. Its words sliding through him and into Geraldine, constructing new worlds out of shit and degrading pure ones. He felt like Tim Robbins, swimming through a river of shit.

            “Awe c’mon now Geraldine, don’t do this to me. I went through all this trouble to write up this special order for you. I had to go talk to my BOSS! Putting my ass on the line, because I told him that you needed this, that it was your last chance and that it had to work. I poured my heart out for you!” His eyes narrowed as his face assumed the position associated with disbelief and scorn.

             Which he didn’t feel.

             “What am I supposed to tell them now? That I was wrong about you? That you were too afraid to pull the trigger? To do what you needed to do for your family? No, Geraldine, I believe in you!” He balled his fist and squeezed his eyes shut as he said the word ‘believe’.

            Which he didn’t.

            “YOU are strong enough to do this-”

             She wasn’t.

            “-and you can’t waste another second! Now all we need is some basic information to get this ball rollin’, what’s the number on that first card o’ yours?”

            She was simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt, split in twain. Spilt, soaked up, and redeposited. The shit-statue of Stimpy that Hermit-Ren made in his solitary cave. A shadow of herself. His forever.

            He cheerily recorded the numbers she sobbed through the telephone, lost in thought, eyes vacuous and untouched by his mouth’s happy contortions. She gave him some digits and he gave himself.

            After it was over he went to the whiteboard and added 5,000 dollars to the number next to his name. He swaggered to the wall and rang the sales bell, alerting everyone in the office of what he had done. He threw his arms in the air, let his mouth gape, and squinted his eyes in a convincing victory pose.

            They clapped for him and applauded his great success.