A Firing Offense

THREE




THE NEXT MORNING I called the office at nine A.M. from a payphone located in the side parking lot of the Connecticut Avenue store. Ric Brandon picked up his extension.

“Hello, Ric?”

“Yes.”

“Nick Stefanos here.”

“Where are you?” In his typically tight-assed manner he was asking why I was late for work.

“I’m on my way to Connecticut Avenue,” I lied, not wanting to get the boys in trouble. None of them had arrived yet to open the store.

“What for?”

“Listen, Ric. All of last night I thought about our discussion yesterday in your office. I think one of the reasons I don’t have that team spirit is that I’ve lost touch with what’s going on out in the stores, out on the firing line.” I stopped speaking so as not to make myself sick.

“I understand.” Since he had never been on the “firing line,” that imaginary, danger-filled zone that lowly salesmen are so keen on referring to, he could not have understood. But I had counted on that.

“What I figure is, I’ll get back on the floor for a few weeks, see what’s going on again, talk to some customers and find out what they do and don’t respond to in our ads.”

“What about your regular duties?”

“What I can’t do here, I’ll finish up at night. I have a key to the office, and my Post contacts can do pickups here at the store. As for any important meetings or appointments, you call me here, I can be back in the office in fifteen minutes.”

“I can see the merit in this,” he said, adding, “if you apply yourself. Understand that I’d like you to report to Gary Fisher every day as to the merchandising and advertising plans.”

“Sure, Ric. Transfer me over to Fisher then, will you?”

The phone rang several times, then Fisher picked up. In contrast to the dead calm of Brandon’s office, I could hear people laughing, typewriters clacking, and unanswered phones ringing in the background. I imagined a cigarette lodged above Fisher’s ear.

“Fish, it’s Nick.”

“Where the f*ck are you?”

“The Avenue. I’m going to be working out of here for a while. I had to get away from the office, man. You know what I mean?”

“Not really. You worked your way up from stockboy to sales to management, now you want to go backwards. Besides, I need you here.”

“I’ll still do my job, only I’ll do it from the store.”

“You see Electro-World’s ad today?” he asked, changing the subject as if to ignore it.

“I haven’t seen the paper yet.”

“They ran a TP400 for two ninety-nine, the lousy giveaway artists. Tell the fellas not to match that price, hear? If we have to take a bath, we can wait till Black Friday.”

“You’re going to wait till the Friday after Thanksgiving to run a piece that everyone’s in the paper with now?”

“I’m not worried,” he said. “There’s gonna be a shortage of low-end goods this Christmas. The Japs and the Koreans are holding back, trying to drive up the costs to the distributors. My guess is, the longer we hold back on the bait, we’ll be the only ones in town with the plunder come D-Day. We bring ’em through the door, pass a few out, lose our asses—we’ll make it up on add-ons and service policies.”

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. “F*ck 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.