BODY Chapter 5.0

What is work without humiliation?

How can we trust it?

if it doesn’t ask too much?

if it doesn’t strip us of our dignity?

if it doesn’t leave us injured

And begging for more?

What good is work without humiliation?

                                            AdiM

The regular Monday/Friday 9am sales meeting was a pointless exercise, in terms of improving sales. In reality Lonnie saw it as part silly pep talk, part bribery to increase the greed of the sales people, part Marquise de Sade fantasy camp: a chance to vent some anger, degrade some people and lecture the ignorant on matters they did not perceive and would never understand. How to sell ice to Eskimos. How to sell sand to Bedouins. How to sell common sense to a Democrat. How to sell the milk of human kindness to a Republican. It was his favorite sport. He liked telling people how to sell things. Once he was caught on a quiet summer morning lounging in a Cadillac with a huge banc front seat, staring at the sparse traffic on Van Ness.  He was reading the business section of the Chronicle. A salesman asked him if the Giants won. Lonnie said stentoriously, I don’t read the sports pages. I only believe in three things: fucking, sucking, and selling cars

Lonnie was awash in nostalgia for what made sense. What has become of retail? The sales meeting was a hold over from Lonnie’s days as a car salesman, actually an owner/manager of a Foreign Car lot near Ellis Brooks Chevrolet on Van Ness. They turned the ancient fabled Bush and Van Ness Chevy showroom into a Whole Foods ten years ago.

If a brain could spit, his would have hocked a loogie across the room at his embarrassing sales force. For Lonnie life was simple, selling was success, losing a sale was dishonor. There is no success without pride, and what’s more the unalloyed submissiveness of others. Their obsequiousness made even business failure trivial. To sacrifice honor to get a sale was not acceptable. Better to lose the sale than to be humiliated or treated like a wimp. It was about balls.

Lonnie was once upon a time big stuff on Van Ness auto row, when it was car-selling heaven up to the late 90’s. His dealership was called Yellow Dick’s Global Imports. He specialized in Italian cars. He sold the smart little Alfas, even Maseratis and Lamborghinis, Ferraris of course, and only the sporty oriental cars, not the popular suburban cheapsters and SUVs. He ignored the drift of the market in favor of indulging his passion for certain cars that were by and large impractical and focused on a slim niche.He believed if you have to ask how much it costs, then you can’t afford it. The world had become dominated by the safe, the green, the practical, and the cheap rather than edgy pleasure and deadly thrills and just goddam exhilaration. Lonnie had lost that business, refusing to be wrong until he was broke, fallen—Oh how the mighty are fallen, he would say with a laugh, shaking off his own straightened circumstances.

Nothing in this world resembled the way he ran the business. In the old days, only ten years ago, you needed to talk to the customer, face-to-face, looking him square in the eye, willing to lie without scruple, without breaking a sweat, manipulating the Ups into spending something they did not have, on something they did not really want. You had to stir their passion, to shepherd their impulses. You sold them what you had, not what they wanted. You shaped their desire, cultivated their appetites, overcame their objections, kicked out the begrudging obstructions of some lurking and useless fifth wheel, like a skeptical wife or a sidekick who thought he was too clever to be duped. Then you had to  close them. It was a formula that never failed: you sell in person, you sell yourself, you cherish your brand, and you position yourself with right product on the right corner in the right city. All things then are not only possible, but inevitable. Only now they weren’t.

Now you could sell everything while lying in a bed in some smarmy adolescent’s bedroom in Chapel Hill or from an office that looked more like a YMCA Rec Room somewhere on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto or in some ersatz loft in Cupertino. Some “businesses” were run from a table and a laptop in one of those pretend workspaces, where the usually housebound & sweaty online entrepreneurs or self-titled “day traders” would come, seeking a network, and rent a desk just to imagine they have a job site.

Nothing required you to see a customer or to talk to them or to close them in person. Everything was outreach on social networks, and layout, an online presence and a simple instruction, click this if you want to get that. You did not make anything or show anything in real life. It was a virtual shop with imaginary items on nonexistent shelves, things that never rotted or gathered dust because you work in a world without dust or bacteria. The customers did not need to be dressed or even human. They did not need to feel with their fingers or smell or climb aboard or lift anything.  They only needed a debit card and a mailing address. They couldn’t walk out on you because they never walked in.

Wake up! Goddammit! Lonnie shouted as he walked into the crowded meeting room. It was no more than a cubicle and five people could barely fit, especially if one of them was Lonnie. He was 6 foot 5 and weighed over 300 pounds, most it in his belly area. He clearly had massive strength in his rarely used arms and his shock of blonde hair seemed almost made of metal. It was thrown into the air above his head like James Franco’s, or ws it James Dean's pompadour. It was carefully designed and executed every morning using a secret recipe that Lonnie considered quite magical.

            The young boys, as Lonnie called them, were dressed in identical electric blue uniform shirts with yellow piping and with their name in cursive letters on the left breast over their hearts and the name of the store on back: Yellow Dick’s Electronics in yellow satin letters with a cartoon picture that was clearly Lonnie holding a plasma video screen over his head in a kind superhero pose. The cartoon Lonnie wore blue tights with a big Yellow Y on his chest, and exaggerated bulging muscles in his chest and arms.

            Lonnie started  his homily to the slouching congregation: Yesterday and every day this week I have seen Up’s come into the store and leave without buying anything. That’s got to end. Lonnie roamed the room and stopped to focus on different  unresponsive sales people. If Up’s are here, they are looking for something. No Up comes to the store without some hunger to buy and without money in his or her pocket. It is up to us to get that money out of their pocket and into my pocket—and your pocket too.

And Goddamit, this is not a museum or a fucking showroom for the internet, so that people can look at what the TV really looks like and then go home and buy it online. That’s crap! So if you let anyone walk away on Saturday or Sunday, or today for that matter, without turning the Up to someone else. You are going to be looking for a new fucking job. That’s the simple truth.

If they want to leave, how are we stopping them from leaving? Eddison asked laconically without looking Lonnie directly in the face..

Lonnie spoke as if he were writing out a list of instructions for a moron: Fucking tell them to stay right there while you go get someone else and they will. It is human psychology. They want to follow orders and they do not want to disobey. But you have to have the balls to deliver the order. It is a matter of who is in charge.

Lonnie now paused for a long time and no one broke the silence not even to cough. I think you buttholes are born to be losers. You can’t figure that out. You tell them to stay and they stay. It is that simple. Then you go get someone else and you tell the Up: This is my floor manager and he knows more than I do or some such bullshit. And then we get one more bite at the apple. It is not astronautics or anything. Just selling.

Eddison was sorry he even said anything at all. Juss, who like Edison was not far past twenty and wearing something that looked like it was two sizes too big for him, suddenly broke his silence and said quizzically: Who’s the floor manager?

Listen, Fuck up. Lonnie was getting weary. It doesn’t matter who you get, just find someone to call the fucking floor manager and turn the Up over to someone else to close. That’s all. Then you keep your job. And maybe you get a piece of the sale.

The third twenty-something, called Spitfire, scratched his dirty hair, calmed the rising tension by changing the subject: Do we get any spiffs this weekend?

Lonnie looked the kid with disgust at his venality, as if Lonnie had no respect for anyone who was stoked by greed. He finally said, If you go over ten grand in sales for a day, you get fifty bucks. If you sell the old jumbo plasma in the corner, I’ll give you ten. If you sell a home entertainment system with the Samsung 55” LED 3D HDTV 1080 pixels, 240 herz, with all the crap, you get 100 bucks. Lonnie seemed to be wounded as he made these agreements. But the old product had to go out the door before he could bring in the new product for football season. Pre-season started in August.

            Now Lonnie looked at his watch. The store wouldn’t be opening for another 25 minutes. He thought about what they should do now. He was out of gas. Okay, he said, take the buckets with Goof Off! The rags and the other crap and go outside. There’s a bunch of tags  and graffiti under the window and on the sides. See if you can do anything about the scratches on the windows too. And pick up the cigarette butts on the sidewalk in front of the store. It looks like a sewer outside. No one is going to want to hang around here, no less come inside and stay awhile. Except the homeless, I guess. A graffiti  nightmare. We got hit pretty hard last night. Be ready to open at 10. Lonnie walked back to his office in the back room.

            Jack got up thankful that he had been a nonentity in this meeting. It was not unusual for Lonnie to take a particular interest in someone and use the meeting to kick the shit out of them. Using his most effective exercises in abuse, he could take someone apart like a drill instructor. For some reason this was a pretty calm morning. Lonnie must’ve been tired, Jack thought as he walked to the closet where the cleaning supplies were. He grabbed a push broom. He was going to try to avoid bending over to pick butts up or crouching and kneeling to scrub graffiti under the windows. His back was sore already.

The walls had a strange stencil on it repeated a few times in three colors, a horse with wings and the head of a bald eagle. It was a couple of different versions. There was also an egg shape with the letters DLK in the center. Some other tags were repeated next to the egg almost framing it with some indecipherable scrawl. 

           Must be the tag of a graffiti crew. Jack said as Juss used the Goof Off! to quickly and effortlessly smear the letters. Then he wiped as much as he could away with a rag. Jack stopped to watch him and Spitfire do this with surprising energy and efficiency. This is a kind of Banksy thing you know the stencils and then there’s the OBEY kind of thing by that other guy.

            Fairey, Eddison said. He kept picking up cigarette butts with a 4-foot long pinching trash grabber that he worked with some skill. It is not Shepard Fairey. It is not frickin’ Banksy either. It is not anything that might have anything to do with art school or museum gift shops. Suddenly Juss, Spitfire and Eddison were laughing  and poking each other. It’s us man. Spitfire said. We’re the crew that bombed this place last night, Juss continued the explanation for him. We are DLK. And that is our hippogriff logo and our egg. They are pieces made with outlines. Eddison completed Juss’s comment. And what have you. Then they all laughed with some kind of relief.

We came last night. Now today we are scrubbing it. Eddison said emphasizing the irony. That’s the way it should be. Like in the Worm, brother, where the Queen says, Well you cannot be a hero unless you have something to be a hero about. Eddison was all the while reaching with his grabber with gun handle grip to get a candy wrapper. He pinched it carefully. He continued his explanation. So she goes to the gods and says, My heroes have defeated the hideous enemy and now my heroes are lost without their usual adventures and so they are depressed. Can you turn the time back to when we needed them, the heroes and let them start defeating those fascists over again? And the gods said, Sure. And now we have this eternal cycle of chaos, enemy, fight, victory, peace, chaos, enemy, fight, victory, peace, chaos and so on and so on. Eddison was clearly the philosopher of the group, and the historian, the clergyman, and the leader as well. Jack could see his central role in their nighttime adventure in the way that Juss and Spitfire looked at Eddison, with what had to be considered for them to be profound reverence. 

Lonnie leaned through the door and looked outside and said, It's time to open the store. Eddison and the crew gathered up the supplies and put them back in the buckets. Spitfire jogged back into the store with one bucket, Eddison followed him almost ceremonially with another. Jack still had the broom. Juss then turned to Jack and said quietly. He gave us our street art names. Juss is not my real name. Eddison named the crew too.  Juss pointed above his head at the letters in the one remaining image of an egg that floated above them as they crossed the threshold: DLK.