There was a period of three weeks when Mr. Blue came daily to the apartment and passed the afternoon hours with me. During these visits we talked about professional football, about which Mr. Blue knew nothing, and about the two things which interested Mr. Blue most: aluminum siding, which he sold, and cunnilingus, on which he suspected I was an authority.
In the aluminum siding racket Mr. Blue was a “closer.” He traveled about with two or three fuzzy-cheeked, comely, spirited Ivy League types who were “canvassers” and whose job it was to get Mr. Blue into a house so that he could get the buyer’s signature on a contract, thus “closing” the sale. Mr. Blue would park his powder-blue Cadillac in a neighborhood ripe for sales; the canvassers, leaving Mr. Blue in the car with a copy of True Detective, would fan out in various directions, ringing doorbells. If a canvasser got into a house, he was at some point in his pitch to explain to the housewife that her luck was indeed running hot as a “factory representative” from “Alcoa” was in town that day, that the man was distressed, oh, heartsick, at the absence of aluminum in her neighborhood, and that if, as a sales inducement to her neighbors, she would apply siding to her house, the canvasser was certain the “Alcoa” man would do the job for nothing—well, practically nothing. If the gullible Hausfrau agreed to hear more, Mr. Blue was hastily lured from reading “The Rape of the Vassar Girls” and all five feet, three of him, carrying a great portfolio case loaded with siding samples, color samples, and contracts, attempted an entrance spectacular enough to cow the housewife before the talks even began.
Mr. Blue sighed. The canvassers had no class or style today. They did not even know how to make an introduction properly; nowadays most of them expected Mr. Blue to carry his own portfolio case, which was, it seems, undignified for the “factory representative.” When Mr. Blue had started in the business as a canvasser years before, they had used a chauffeur-driven black Cadillac “about a goddam mile long.” Their favorite driver had been a very dignified “nigger” named Seedy who stood six feet, six and who had a “jawful” of marvelous gold teeth. The Cadillac had pulled up in front of the customer’s domicile, Seedy had jumped out, opened the back door to discharge the great man, grabbed the portfolio case and the roll of carpeting, and had begun running up the side walk toward the house. “And he ran his black ass off,” Mr. Blue said.
Here Mr. Blue paused, wondering whether what he had to say would find sympathy with me. He took a chance. “Not like these independent black bastards today,” he said. He gave his words the semi-humorous and cowardly twist men do when they aren’t sure they can enlist one on the side of their melancholy ignorance. I’m certain my rum expression showed neither sympathy nor disapproval. This bewildered Mr. Blue into a qualification, a grudging one to be sure. “What a guy Seedy was!”
“I’m sure,” I said.
On gaining admittance to the house, the first thing Seedy did was open the red carpet and begin rolling it down the middle of the living room for the closer (i.e., the “Massa”) to make his grandiose entrance on.
“A carpet?” I shrieked in delight. “Didn’t that offend the customer? I mean, mightn’t she think your factory man thought he was too good to walk on her carpet? Or something?”
No. No. No. Mr. Blue was impatient with my levity. In those happy days all the closers had been “psychologists”; if they sensed they were causing offense, they simply explained they knew how hard the woman toiled and hadn’t wanted to dirty up her home. “Yeah,” Mr. Blue said. “There was one closer, Sally DiMidio, if you got him into a house, you automatically had five hundred bucks. Three hundred for Sally, a hundred and a half for me, and half a yard for Seedy.”
Mr. Blue was still concerned about my lack of response to his racial sympathies. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he assured me. “We took real good care of Seedy. That black bastard always had a roll as big as his dong, and every high-yellow broad in Jersey City laid down her golden ass for him!” Mr. Blue shook his head nostalgically and sighed. Heavily. When Mr. Blue sighed, it was immeasurably sad, like high winds blowing through leafless autumn trees. When Mr. Blue sighed, he had an unnerving habit of obliquely studying one to see if one sensed the depth of his sadness. When Mr. Blue sighed, I always pursed my lips in the most commiserating way and did my best, to little avail, to form great-sized tears in my eyes.
Was Mr. Blue full of shit? Somehow I couldn’t be sure, but his tales, under the harsh weight of reflection, seemed glaringly preposterous. Whenever, for example, I envisioned the timid housewife, expecting the Brooks Brothers type “Alcoa” man and opening her door to the six-feet-six Seedy, smiling a roomy smile to expose his great glittering teeth, the only vision I got was of her swooning dead away. So whenever Mr. Blue told me these stories—and Mr. Blue told me these stories all the time—I found that I had to repress a terrible urge to interrupt him, employing the dramatic pauses and gravity of Mr. Blue himself, and say, “Mr. Blue, you know something? … You’re full of shit!”
Talking shop was with Mr. Blue a one-man oratorio. He did the recitative, performed the aria, acted a plaintiff chorus. His voice rose and fluttered with excitement. He chanted explanations. Reverently, he emoted with the nostalgia of poetry. The young men of today, he wailed, wouldn’t deign to use some of the methods he had employed for gaining admittance to a house. Mr. Blue had rung doorbells and immediately had backed off the porch and walked to the middle of the yard. When the owner had answered the bell’s jangling summons, he had found an exasperated Mr. Blue, hands jammed furiously down on his hips, rocking impatiently on the balls of his feet, standing in the middle of the lawn and staring in mock-horrified disgust at the man’s house. “What is it?” the man would ask. “Yes?” Pivoting slowly, ever so dramatically, Mr. Blue would suddenly start screaming at the man. Save that no words came.
In imitation Mr. Blue made his mouth go for me, mouthing his voiceless anger, disgust, disappointment. He did it superbly. His great blue eyes widened in rage, his rubbery mouth opened and closed with desperate sincerity, even his aging, hairy ears seemed in fury to distend perceptibly from the sides of his snowy head. Still—no words came. He was like that superb double-talker who appeared in the cinema comedies of the thirties and forties; no matter how often one heard him, one always strained, sweated, tilted one’s head, and gasped painfully attempting to decipher the indecipherable. Standing but a few feet from my prone figure on the davenport, Mr. Blue had me convinced that an impenetrable curtain had suddenly and insidiously descended over my ears. Laughing wildly, I paid Mr. Blue the homage his artistry deserved.
Cupping his hand over his ear and actually listing toward me, Mr. Blue now became the distraught customer. “Huh?” “What’s that?” “How’s that you say?”—as he was being drawn slowly, presumably unconsciously, down his steps and across his lawn to the magnetic and fatal Mr. Blue. When Mr. Blue had the man next to him, it was, one guessed, all but over. Placing his arm about the man’s waist, and theatrically flourishing his arm in the direction of the man’s house, Mr. Blue, using his voice for the first time, wanted to know of the man whether he wasn’t ashamed of having a house in such sorry repair, whether he didn’t think his home a blight and an eye sore on the entire neighborhood. Mr. Blue’s tone was now one of earnest solicitation. He liked the man. He wanted to help him.
Mr. Blue stared at me. Was he getting through to me? Apparently not. Asking me to rise from the davenport so that he might demonstrate, he pulled me into snug contact with his thin and muscular torso. While he talked soothingly to me, as father to son, his hand alternated between clutching me vice-like and opening to pat me tenderly on the layer of fat above my waistline. Again sweeping his free arm in the direction of what was supposed to be my shack but which was only the apartment’s bare beige walls, he earnestly, and with just a touch of melancholy, asked whether I wasn’t embarrassed by what I beheld. When I made no answer, still not grasping my role, Mr. Blue demanded, “What would you say?”—meaning, I guess, if I were the luckle
ss homeowner in the wiry little grasp of Mr. Blue’s fanaticism. Smiling sheepishly, I stutteringly agreed that my house was indeed a cyclopean atrocity. “Naturally that’s what you’d say,” Mr. Blue said, releasing me from his fierce grip and allowing his chest to expand with the pride of his craft.
As he always did, Mr. Blue now jammed his hands down into the pockets of his suit coat and strutted, peacock proud and pensive, about the living room, giving his timeworn and hard-won lore time to seep through to me. Smiling, I imagined that now Seedy and Sally DiMidio would slither up to the curb in the mile-long Cadillac, disembark, and the three of them, with the six-foot-six, dear-toothed, jet-black, and
carpet-bearing Seedy leading the way, would descend on the house for the slaughter.
Seldom during those three weeks did I ever cease laughing —drifting between outright roaring and an exhausted giggling —with Mr. Blue. And though I was enjoying his visits immensely, I had no idea exactly who Mr. Blue was and what he wanted of me. Whenever I questioned him about his relationship with the Counselor, he became moody and silent, for which reason I suspected that he had retained the Counselor in a criminal matter, probably, I surmised, something to do with his rather shady vocation, perhaps an illegal contract? One of the things that led to this suspicion was that of all the characters who crept in and out of the apartment, it was Mr. Blue with whom the Counselor was least friendly. To be sure, passing from the front door to the bedroom, the Counselor came after a time to acknowledge Mr. Blue by mock-ordering, after the manner of a Marine sergeant, “Give us fifty, Mr. Blue”; but as often as not, laughing, he passed on before the mildly red-faced and popeyed Mr. Blue had reached his twentieth push-up, a slight which never deterred Mr. Blue’s finishing the push-ups for my admiration. And so, though I did not for some time learn Mr. Blue’s mysterious relationship with the Counselor, he one day told me what he had in mind for me: he was, he said, in the manner of one making a marriage proposal which he knows will be disesteemed, seeking a new canvasser, one with class, and he had, after giving it no little thought, decided that that canvasser and I were one.
By that time I had again fallen prone to the dreamer’s abysmal ways and again for days at a time lay unshaven on the davenport. Thick scales of ugly dandruff clung to my scalp, coffee stains as big as silver dollars patterned my fragrant ivory sweatshirt, and sitting all about me on the floor, like a scale model of some ominous and ghastly city of the future, were Budweiser beer cans, empty and half-empty, through whose can-opener apertures I had stuffed my scarcely smoked cigarettes. That behind this grimy front Mr. Blue could envision an I’m-working-my-way-through-college type moved me to near-hysteria and I ended, to Mr. Blue’s chagrin, by rolling all about the floor, toppling the “towers” of my nightmare city and spilling the contents of stale beer and irriguous cigarette butts onto the carpeting.
But Mr. Blue was a tough closer and hence proved an oppressively pertinacious suitor. He had some deranged notion of the typical housewife slinking about all day in a reeky housecoat, chain-smoking, scratching her “hairy ass,” and undesistingly yearning for oral stimulation of her labia. “That’s all they think about!” Mr. Blue said. “It’s a thing with them!” Moreover, he had come to believe that there was about me an aura of abandonment (an Ivy League one?) which intimated I had spent a good part of my near-thirty years with my cheeks flanked by luxurious and crushing thighs. Contrary protests did no good. The more stridently I objected, the more Mr. Blue smiled knowingly, letting me know that it was perfectly okay with him if I were blighted, so much the better as “broads can spot lappers” and doors would open for me like so, and here Mr. Blue snapped his fingers so startlingly that goose-pimples played a tune on my spine. Often I became angry. “Jesus, Mr. Blue! Would you get that notion about me out of your head!” But my ire, of course, only reinforced what he already “knew,” and ultimately, exhausted, nearly tearful and laughing simultaneously, I shouted petulantly, “I give in! Goddammit, I give up!”
Ordering me to rise and seal the partnership with a solemn handshake, Mr. Blue then celebrated the ritual with two front flips and a fantastically frantic little fandango, danced on his lunatic, elevated, alligator shoes. Further directing me to shower and shave, Mr. Blue gave me the money to get my seersucker jacket from the cleaner’s and took me downtown to visit “his” barber. In the four days I canvassed for Mr. Blue, I got him into one house, that of a young woman who was in fact deaf. Though she had smooth, well-made legs, melon-like, inmate’s dreams of breasts, and a charmingly languorous glow (about none of which was she overly conscious), as Mr. Blue had so sibyllinely claimed she would be, she was dressed in a sleazy housecoat and was voraciously wolfing the evil weed. Unable to understand me, she asked me into her kitchen, sat me at an indigo-enameled table, and gave me a pad and pencil with which to express my wants. After I did so, she gave me a piece of cinnamon toast and a glass of milk; and while I ate and drank these, she told me about her deafness. While explaining it, she sometimes talked, which she did perfectly well; at other times, she usurped the pad and wrote things down, as though, unable to hear herself, she at times doubted my capacity to do so. She said her deafness was at first thought to have been caused by a childhood illness; but as the specialists could find no physical damage to the ear, they were now suggesting the cause was psychosomatic. She smiled a self-disparaging smile and good-naturedly asked if I thought she was nuts. Taking my maxim from the Counselor, I wrote on the pad: “We’re all a little of that.” Talking, we both laughed a lot, and as easily as the intimacy of those melon-like breasts displayed above the V of her housecoat allowed. Despite the easiness, it was obvious that the deafness was the event of her life, the happening which had lifted her from the deathlike drudgery of house work, and as she talked of it her eyes assumed the lambency of passion.
Telling her tale took some time; and because I so admirably forbore, she felt the least she could do in return was listen to Mr. Blue’s sales arguments. Though I was certain she wasn’t going to buy any siding, I thought it would give him respite from the sappy sadism of his True Detective and a chance to stretch his legs. I thought, too, that in his penetrating blue eyes I might for a moment appear a more adroit partner than I
was. As she was only doing it as a favor to me, I shouldn’t have wasted Mr. Blue’s time; his confrontation with her was to turn into a nasty business anyway, and I mention it now by way of suggesting that in the four days I worked for Mr. Blue I didn’t get him into any other house. I wasn’t a good canvasser.
Over the days passed in the apartment Mr. Blue had hortatively acted out the techniques for getting into a house; and though I had attentively, not to say raptly, watched these memorable performances, all Mr. Blue’s methods seemed to me too canny and frenzied. Within me I retained an ingenuous purity of heart that didn’t allow me to believe that Madison Avenue had so dunned the American buyer that to sell him necessitates pounding him on the top of his beleaguered dome, sticking thumbs into his eyeballs, and kicking him in the groin. Moreover, my hair was still black, my figure svelte (well, almost svelte), my eyes didn’t yet reflect the soul’s discontent, and as Mr. Blue had so often implied, I believed a demure, college-boy approach would serve me best. I rang the doorbell, nervously hummed, tapped my foot, and cleared my throat while waiting; heard eager footfalls; amiably watched doors open on abruptly hostile and suspicious eyes; smiled my good-guy, strictly aboveboard smile; and brimmingly announced, “I’m selling aluminum siding!” “Donwanannny,” the customer said. “Okay,” I said, and walked jauntily off the porch. To the next house I traversed wide lawns fraught with familiar though forbidding obstacles: accursed canines and their shoe-fouling droppings, overturned tricycles, catchers’ mitts, unseen croquet wickets, and lawn sprayers forming whiplike, penetrating, and devilishly unpredictable patterns. At the next house I said, “I’m selling aluminum siding!” “Donwanannny,” the customer said. “Okay,” I said, and walked somewhat less spiritedly off the porch.
By the start of the fourth day both Mr. Blue and I knew that as a door-to-door man I was ruinously lackadaisical, a problem of Sisyphean knottiness; but as we were having such an exhilarating time, we avoided saying as much. Daily we knocked off at one o’clock, went to a saloon for what was supposed to be a hurriedly gulped cheeseburger, and remained there the rest of the afternoon, drinking. Moose’s or O’Reilly’s or Big John’s, these were neighborhood bars consisting of imitation paneling, gallon jars of emetic, red-dyed pickled sausages, and quaint sayings and tenth-rate prizefighters Scotch-taped to the mirror of the back bar: “you don’t have to be CRAZY TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS” and “Good luck to Big John, a real swell guy, from his old pal, Slugger,” whose glossy print indicated he had taken more slugs than given. Invariably from some nook in the room a life-sized, cardboard, and Technicolored waitress named Mabel winked forever lasciviously and invited one to shout, “Hey, Mabel,” and demand a bottle of Black Label. From me, whenever possible, Mabel got ink-serrated upper teeth; a Mischa Auer mustache; and, enclosed in a hastily penned cartoonist’s balloon, a gratuitous piece of graffito: “Norman Mailer is a straight lay,” “Naughty Hester Prynne fornicated,” or simply, “Support Smut!”
Whenever we entered Moose’s or O’Reilly’s or Big John’s, said proprietor, along with his beer-abstracted clientele of pallid, swing-shift factory workers, sallow-faced, obese whores, purblind welfare recipients, and toothless, wheezing old men, was distracted momentarily from the television to stare at us with that distaste the inhabitant of cockneydom reserves for the peerage. If he meant to intimidate us, he didn’t know Mr. Blue. The proprietor, for his rude stare, got from him an enthusiastic, up-from-the-belly belch; a theatrical, hip-wriggling stretch; an oh-me-oh-my yawn; an unctuous, affectionate scratching of his balls; and a “You got any food in this dump?” Not even Big John ever challenged such brashness.