Fisher was a typical merch manager, a sloppy, chain-smoking, audiophilic post-smoking salesman who had grudgingly been promoted to management. He was built low to the ground, had an unfashionably long Prince Valiant haircut, and motored around the office pitched forward, his fists clenched like some driven cartoon villain. He would never advance beyond his current position—the image wasn’t there, and neither was the will—but he was unequaled at Nathan’s in his knowledge of retail.
“What else?”
“That bitch Fein called again from Montgomery County Consumer Affairs,” he said. “Said we’ve got to stop using the word sale in the head of our ads if we’re not lowering our everyday prices.”
“So I’ll call this next ad a blowout.”
“Perfect.”
“Do me one favor, Fish. Keep Brandon away from me as much as you can, will you?”
“Yeah, sure. But, Nick, why does the guy spell his name R-i-c?”
“I guess R-o-c-k was already taken.”
“Talk to you later.” He hung up.
I walked around the building to the front of the store and looked in the plate-glass display window. Louie Bates, the store manager, had arrived. He ambled along the left wall, switching on television sets.
I pushed on the door and entered. The layout of the floor had changed very little. Up front was a glass case that surrounded a desk and register and contained small electronics and accessories. This was also the cashiers’ station and the area where the salesman closed, TO’d to the manager, and wrote deals.
The left half of the store contained televisions of all varieties, portable to widescreen. An aisle in the middle of the store was wide enough to handtruck merchandise from the stockroom to the front door. The right half of the store contained low-end rack stereos, boom boxes, clock radios, auto sound, microwave ovens, small appliances, and other low-commission goods. The entire rear of the showroom housed high-end audio, a “room” that was simply a thinly carpeted part of the store where the lights had been dimmed. A banner hung across its entrance, grandly announcing this area as “The Sound Explosion.”
Gold and red, Nutty Nathan’s official colors, dominated in the form of signage, tags, and “accent striping.” Salesmen were at one time required to wear gold sportcoats with a red coat-of-arms sewn across the breast pocket, consisting of a triumvirate depicting a television, stereo, and microwave oven. Salesforce rebellion in the form of filthy jackets forced management to end this dress code. The day this requirement was lifted McGinnes and I had poured lighter fluid on ours and burned them ceremoniously in the parking lot.
The outright tackiness and near-vulgar ambience of Nathan Plavin’s stores were intentional. Plavin had picked the colors, as well as the jackets. On slow Saturdays he’d call managers and instruct them to scatter empty cartons in the aisles, to make it appear as if the salesmen were too busy writing up bargains to bother with keeping the place clean. But that had been in the past, when Nathan was more on top of the day-to-day operations of his company.
Louie was surprised to see me in his store. He was a short, barrel-chested guy in his fifties with a wide, flat nose that appeared to have been smashed in by a shovel. As he walked towards me, I noticed that his gut had swelled, his neck had all but disappeared, and there was much more gray salted into his hair. He looked somewhat like a cinderblock with legs.
“You lost, Youngblood?” he asked.
“Could be,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’ll be working here for a couple of weeks. Management wants me to get back in touch with the business.”
“You wouldn’t be spying on your old boss, would you, buddy?”
I didn’t answer that but said, “I’ll stay out of your way, Louie.”
“Whatever.” He threw up his arms in a gesture of surrender. “Listen, your boys are late as usual, and I got to get this place open. I’ll talk to you later, hear?”
Louie returned to the television section. As the manager of the highest volume store, he knew what his priorities were: to put out fires and to protect his salesmen from the main office. In turn, he was covered by his employees during his daily afternoon visits to his girlfriend across the street in the Van Ness apartments, and on those mornings when his hangovers kept him paralyzed with his head on the desk in the “employee lounge” at the rear of the store.
A small bell sounded as the front door opened, and I turned to see Andre Malone flowing towards me. He was tall, reedy, and elegant in his no-vent sportcoat, silk shirt and tie, reverse pleated trousers, and Italian loafers. Though he’d come out of one of the most hopelessly dangerous sections of the city, there was something of the aristocrat in his bearing and in the way he held his head. He saw me and widened his eyes in mock amazement.
“What’s goin’ on, Country?” he said. I touched the sharp crease on his trousers and pulled my hand away quickly as if I had been cut.
“You may be the prettiest person I’ve ever known.”
He smiled and revealed a perfect row of teeth below his Wyatt Earp mustache. “I see you’re doin’ all right yourself. Finally wearin’ some cotton. Used to be I was afraid to light a match around your polyester ass.”
“I’m on the fast track, Andre. I had to upgrade.”
“What you doin’ here, man?” His forehead wrinkled as he found a Newport in his breast pocket and lit it in one fluid movement.
“I’ll be working here for a while,” I said vaguely. “Whatever deals I write, I’ll throw to you or Johnny. I might need you to protect me every so often from the office, in case I’m not here.”
“Uh-huh,” he said suspiciously, then jerked his head towards the door as the small bell rang. “Here comes your boy now.”
Johnny McGinnes blew through the front door and goose-stepped towards the back. There was neither surprise nor delight on his face when he saw me. In acknowledgment he pulled two sixteen-ounce cans of Colt 45 from each of his stretched-out pockets and wiggled his eyebrows in my direction, then continued by.
A young woman entered just behind him and hurried around the glass case, stowing her books and purse somewhere below the counter. I caught her eye and she straightened her posture.
Malone was walking alongside Louie now, pleading with him to call an irate customer and iron things out. Louie would eventually do it, but at the moment was torturing Malone with silence. I made my way across the worn gold-and-red carpet squares of the Sound Explosion and entered the back room.
I walked through a short hallway that contained Louie’s desk. The hallway led to the “radio room,” the toilet, and the entrance to the stockroom in the basement. I stepped into the radio room. McGinnes was finishing a swallow of malt liquor and hiding the can behind some stock.
He was not especially tall, though his perfect posture gave the illusion of presence. His clothing was invariably a polyester blend and always clean. He had lost more of his straight black hair since I had last seen him and had begun combing it forward, out and across his forehead in an almost Hitleresque fashion. His tiny nose was set on his flat Mick face like a blemish.
I looked at the top of the Colt can showing from behind a clock radio box. “It’s a little early, isn’t it, Johnny?”
“Early as hell. But if they get too warm, I can’t drink ’em.” He frowned. “Fuck are you, my mother?”
“Let’s go downstairs, man. I need to talk to you.”
I followed him down the noisy wooden steps to the stockroom. The musty odor of damp cardboard met me as I descended the stairs. Naked bulbs dimly lit erratic rows of cartons. We walked to the far corner of the basement. McGinnes pulled a film canister and a small brass pipe out of his pocket and shook some pot out of the vial.
As a stockboy, I’d spent a good portion of my first two years at Nathan’s in this room getting high with McGinnes. I was skinny but cockstrong then, usually wearing some kind of rock-and-roll T-shirt, tight Levi’s cuffed cigarette style, Sears workboots on my feet. My stance was straight up, cigarette between
the first two fingers with the occasional thumb flick on the filter and a shake of my shoulder-length hair for punctuation. McGinnes had slightly longer hair in those days, and mutton-chop sideburns pointing in towards a Fu Manchu that he wore proudly. As we were always stoned, I considered his every word in that basement to be prophetic, and he played the role of sales sage to the hilt.
Somewhere along the line I became a salesman, worked on commission as I put myself through college, cut my hair, was promoted into management, got married and divorced, and generally lost the notion that life was a series of adventures and opportunities waiting to happen. One day a stockboy in one of the stores called me “sir,” and I was alarmed by that panicky, universal moment when we realize that aging is real and for all of us, not just for watery-eyed relatives and quiet old men on the bus.
“So,” he said, folding his arms and cocking his hip, “you’re back.”
“I’m on a sabbatical.”
“You’re no professor. And you sure as hell ain’t no priest, Jim.” McGinnes’ speech patterns were peppered with his idea of black slang, which he picked up not from “the street” but from the pimp sidekick characters on seventies cop shows. Though I had lived in D.C. all my life, I had never once heard a black person use the expression “jive turkey.” Yet McGinnes used it all the time.
“You remember a guy named Pence?” I asked.
McGinnes smiled nervously. “Yeah, I know the old cocker. Lives across the Avenue, in those apartments. I sold him a TV set a long time ago, something else this year.”
“Toaster oven.”
“That’s right. He came over the other day, wanted to bullshit about his grandson or something.”
“You gave him my name?”
“Yeah, I figured it couldn’t hurt. You worked with the kid, maybe you knew something.”
“It’s not like you to help somebody out for nothing.”
“He’s a good customer, that’s all.” McGinnes shrugged, pulled a plastic tube of eyedrops from his pocket, and tilted his head back for a double shot. When he brought his head back down, a tear of eyewash was rolling down his cheek. “So what are you gonna do, look for the kid?”
I nodded. “I only told him I’d ask around a little. The old man’s afraid the kid’s in with the wrong crowd. Drugs, who knows what else. If the cops find him first, he may end up busted. A mistake like that can blow your life before you get out of the gate. Maybe I find him, talk him back home, whatever.”
“So what do you get out of this?”
“I knew the kid and the old man’s desperate. I can’t just blow it off.”
McGinnes glanced over his shoulder at the stairs, tapped another hit into his pipe, fired it up, and tapped out the ashes into his palm. This one he blew towards my face. “Well, it will be a helluva lot easier to work on that out of here than in the office. You know Louie won’t bother you. Besides, you’ll be back on the sales floor, which is where you belong.”
“I might have to remind you how it’s done.”
“You’d just be reminding me of what I taught you in the first place, son.”
“Remember that day I sold a sandbox to an Arab?”
McGinnes said, “That ain’t shit. What about the time I sold a blind man tickets to a silent movie?”
Louie called down that there were customers on the floor. We approached the stairs, and McGinnes elbowed me in the chest and moved ahead, gunning up two steps at a time. He was giggling like a schoolgirl as he hit the landing.
FOUR
MCGINNES CHEWED ON a mint and checked out the floor as we walked down the showroom’s center aisle. Malone stood in the Sound Explosion talking to a light-skinned woman in a leather jacket. He had a Frankie Beverly ballad playing through the stereo, and was close up in her face as he made a slow and awkward attempt at moving to the music.
A guy in a hundred dollar suit with disheveled graying hair stood with his hands in his pockets, blinking absently at the confusingly long line of TV screens lit against the wall. He unfolded my Post ad from his jacket, stared at it, then returned his gaze to the wall.
“Malone’s back there talking himself out of another deal,” McGinnes said. “I’ll take that yom over there by the TVs.”
McGinnes walked over to the customer, staying loose but erect. “How are you today?” he said, extending his hand. The customer shook it limply, without looking McGinnes in the eye.
“Fine. Thank you.”
“Something special for you today?”
“Yes.” The customer jabbed a finger at a spot on my ad. “I’m interested in the nineteen-inch Zenith for one ninety-nine. Do you have it to look at?”
“Oh yes, it’s right over here,” McGinnes said, pointing at the far left section of the wall and gesturing for the man to step ahead of him. McGinnes turned his head back to me, crossed his eyes and hung his tongue out of the side of his mouth. Following the customer, he dragged one leg like a cripple, recovering his posture just as the customer turned to face him.
“What can you tell me about this set?”
“It’s a fine set,” McGinnes said, “and a good value.” The picture on the set was lousy. McGinnes had attached the faulty antenna lead, the one he switched each week to the advertised piece, onto the Zenith.
By comparison the nineteen-inch Hitachi, which sat next to the Zenith, had a beautiful picture. The customer became distracted by this, his head moving back and forth between the two sets.
“Why does that set have a better picture than the Zenith?”
“Oh, they have a high-contrast tube in the Hitachi,” McGinnes said offhandedly.
“What is that?”
“Here, I’ll show you.” In his shirt pocket McGinnes had clipped two pens, a jeweler’s screwdriver, and a small folding magnifying glass, which he pulled out. He placed it over the tube of the Zenith. The color dots were dull against a pale gray background. McGinnes looked back at the customer for effect, then switched the glass to the tube of the Hitachi. The dots were brilliantly illuminated against a black field.
“Interesting,” the customer said. “How much is the Hitachi?”
“Two forty-nine.”
The customer frowned, then pushed his glasses up over the bridge of his nose. “That’s more than I wanted to spend.”
“Well, if you think about it, you’d actually be saving money by buying this set.”
“How’s that?”
“Electronic tuner. The Hitachi’s got an electronic tuner, no moving parts in the tuner whatsoever. The Zenith, which is a fine set, don’t get me wrong, has an old-style click tuner, the first part to go bad on any TV set.” McGinnes spun the dial on the Zenith harshly. “You do that every day, it’s going to wear out. And when it wears out, it’s going to cost you more than the extra fifty bucks you’re going to spend initially on the Hitachi. Not to mention, of course, the Hitachi’s got a much better picture, which you can see for yourself. With a TV set, when you get it home you’re not going to remember what you paid for it. You’re only going to know whether you like the picture or not.”
“Well…. ”
“Plus the fact that we’re an authorized Hitachi service center for this area. In-home service. And for a small charge, which most customers recognize the value in, you can have a maintenance agreement with Nutty Nathan’s to extend that in-home service.”
“I don’t think I’d be interested in that. Besides, if the set’s as good as you say it is, I won’t be needing any service.” The customer smiled smugly.
“Oh, it’s a gamble, I know,” McGinnes said quickly. “And chances are pretty good you’ll never need the service. But you know what they’re charging now just to walk through your front door? Fifty bucks! Just to step in your house, before they even touch the set! I can give you the names of ten people who’ve called to thank me personally for suggesting a maintenance agreement. Anyway, I’m not trying to belabor the point. You do want the Hitachi, though, don’t you?” McGinnes was nodding his head r
apidly, a trick he used to make the customer do the same.
“Yes, I’m pretty sure I do.” Though McGinnes had closed, the customer’s fists were balled defensively in his pockets.
“Where are you from?” McGinnes asked, and smiled.
“From up around Lancaster, P-A.”
“No kidding. I’m from the Allentown area.” The customer seemed to relax as he unhunched his shoulders. McGinnes, an army brat, was from many places, but Pennsylvania wasn’t one of them. “This city’s fine, but I tell you, there’s a lot to be said for my hometown. I miss the slower life, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Let’s just step up to the counter and get you written up.” They walked to the front of the store, McGinnes’ hand gently on the customer’s arm.
The young woman who had walked in earlier carrying her books tapped me on the shoulder and I turned. She was half a foot shorter than me and had a brown speck in one of her very green eyes.
“Hi,” she said cheerfully and smiled. Her front tooth was chipped, just a little. She had on short, black, buckled boots, black patterned stockings, and a jean skirt. Her white oxford was open four buttons down, revealing the beginnings of strong, smallish breasts.
“Hi,” I said.
“You working here now?”
“Yeah. For a little while, anyway. My name’s Nick.”
“I’m Lee. I work the register and sell add-ons up front. Can you take a sales call?”
I looked around. Malone was still in the Sound Explosion and appeared to be chewing his customer’s ear off, literally. McGinnes was up front, writing the deal.
“Where’s Louie?” I asked.
“Out making a deposit.”
“I thought he made his ‘deposit’ in the afternoon.”
Lee chuckled. “This one’s monetary, not seminal.”
“What line?”
“Pick it up on two,” she said, jerking her thumb behind her towards the small appliance wall. “Over there.”