take checks. “The piss-ants probably don’t have that much cash laying around the house,” he had explained.
I decided to work from right to left. I’d start at the first house on the right, then cross over to the first house on my left. A salesman needs a plan.
A plan. I hadn’t thought of that. I was a salesman without a sales pitch. You didn’t just walk up to a body’s front door and say, “Want to buy a set of encyclopedias?”
That certainly hadn’t worked for the guy who sold toothbrushes on the sidewalk. People would walk by, and he would ask, “Want to buy a toothbrush?”
He never sold a one. But then he got a plan. He made some cookies and put dog do-do in them. When people would walk by, he would say, “How about a free cookie?”
People would bite into the cookie and then spit it out. “This cookie,” they would exclaim, “tastes like dog do-do!” At which point the salesman would say, “That’s what it’s made out of. Want to buy a toothbrush?”
I decided to go with the old “I’m-working-my-way-through-college” routine. I would knock on a door, and when someone opened it, I would say:
“Hello. My name is Lewis Grizzard, and I am working my way through college. I’m selling encyclopedias, and I was wondering if perhaps you would be interested in buying a set.”
The person at the door would say, “Well, Timmy’s about to start school, and maybe a set of encyclopedias would really be a help to him. Won’t you come on in? Would you like some coffee before we start?”
I would say, “Yes, please, Cream only. What a nice house you have, Mrs. . . .”
“Carpenter. Mrs. Carpenter. How about a doughnut with your coffee?”
“That would be nice, Mrs. Carpenter,” I would say, and that would be all there was to it. Just that, I’d have my first sale on my way to earning as much as $125 per week.
Nobody came to the door at the first house. At the second, a small child answered.
I asked, “Is your mother home?”
The small child turned around and screamed, “Mommy! There’s a man at the door!”
And Mommy screamed back, “What does he want?”
The kid said to me, “What do you want?”
“I’m selling encyclopedias.”
The kid turned around and screamed again, “He’s selling plysopdias!”
And Mommy screamed back, “Tell him we don’t want any.”
“We don’t want any,” the kid said to me, and slammed the door in my face.
At the third house, a woman came to the door with curlers in her hair. She wore a bathrobe and a pair of fuzzy slippers.
Having been married to three women who were devoted to wearing curlers in their hair and fuzzy shoes on their feet, I have, over the years, put a great deal of thought into this uniquely female getup. My conclusions—remember that I am still concluding, which happens a lot when a man considers various behavioral patterns of women—is that they put curlers in their hair not to curl their hair but to pick up radio stations without having to turn on a radio.
My scientific knowledge is somewhat limited, but I know my ex-wives often had enough metal in their hair to pick up radio stations as far away as Del Rio, Texas. When they picked up rock stations, you actually could see their curlers moving to the raucous beat of the music. Thus, the term “hair-raising music.”
Their curlers were the early runners to the Walkman, and I have further concluded that one of the reasons women say strange things while their hair is up in curlers is they are trying to think at the same time radio waves are bombarding their brains. This causes such utterances as, “You don’t love me and it’s fifty-five on the Southside” and “Why don’t we ever talk anymore? Hi, I’m Casey Kasem.”
As for fuzzy shoes, that’s simple. Women wear fuzzy shoes to keep their feet warm. Women’s feet are always cold. It’s a simple fact of nature, or a quirk of anatomy. Women’s feet are always cold, their bladders are the size of a White Acre pea, and they can hear whispers at three hundred paces if they figure the whisper involves another woman or a piece of gossip. (And, yes, I realize this entire parenthetical exercise is overtly sexist in nature. Recall, however, the time frame in which I am currently writing is 1964, before sexism was invented by a group of women wearing hair curlers and receiving some liberal talk-show blather from public radio.)
I started my sales pitch. The woman interrupted me and said, with an accompanying snarl, “I don’t care who you are and what you’re selling!”
The force of the door slamming to in my face must have jolted Richter scales. There is nothing quite as belittling, I was beginning to understand, as a door being slammed in your face. It said volumes, which could be condensed down to such few words as: “Get the hell away from me, you creep.”
I lasted in the exciting field of sales until eleven that morning. I didn’t sell a single set of encyclopedias. I was allowed in only two houses.
In one, a small poodle dog kept yapping throughout my entire sales pitch. When I finally had finished giving it, the would-be customer, a lady in her sixties, said, “Sorry, but Mr. Binghampton and I don’t read very much.”
At the second house, before I even introduced myself and stated my purpose, a lady said, “Come on in, the set’s in the den.”
She thought I was the television repairman she had called. Do television repairman wear ties on house calls? I wondered. When I told the woman I wasn’t the television repairman but a salesman of encyclopedias, she said, “I don’t want any encyclopedias. I want my television fixed. Do you know anything about televisions?”
I said that I didn’t.
She showed me the door.
I walked out of the subdivision and found a bus stop. When the bus came, I left my sales kit on the sidewalk, got on the bus, and retired.
I would often wonder later what ever became of Howard Barnes.
Many years later, there would appear on television sets across the country a left-handed guitar player/singer/yodeler named Slim Whitman. He would have a pencil-thin mustache and would appear somewhat shiftless. All I’m saying is if Slim Whitman doesn’t look like an ex-used car/encyclopedia salesman, a 1957 Plymouth will start on the first try on a cold morning in February.
The morning after my early retirement from sales, jobless again, I drove back to downtown Atlanta, parked at Union Station again, and got into banking in a matter of hours. I headed down Marietta Street and came to the First National Bank. Why not? I walked inside and located the personnel department.
“I’m Lewis Grizzard,” I said, leaving out the part about my future in journalism, “and I was wondering if you have any job openings.”
A woman, pleasant for a change, handed me an application. I filled it out, gave it back to her, and then she said, “I must ask you to take our standard test.”
Test? That concerned
