Lightning Rods

SPECIAL K

In the morning the sun was shining, birds were singing, and there was dew on the grass. The crazy thoughts of the night before did not look so bad. They looked crazy, but they did not look like crazy things he would seriously think about trying out. Everyone gets crazy thoughts from time to time, it’s what you do about them that counts.

It was time to turn over a new leaf. Eat right. Get some exercise. For instance, instead of taking the car, why not walk to the store?

He walked over to the 7-Eleven and bought a box of Special K and a carton of skim milk.

On his way back to the trailer park he saw a heron fly over the lake and vanish in the reeds. “Now if you’d taken the car you wouldn’t have seen that,” he said. “It’s a beautiful world. You have a right to be here. Now let’s get back to the trailer, have us some breakfast, and get out there and sell some vacuum cleaners.”

After breakfast he washed the bowl and left it to drain. He did not wash the rest of the week’s dishes because it’s important to be able to prioritize. He shaved and dressed and put the Electrolux in the car.

“Skooby dooby doo, exchanging glances, skooby dooby dooby dooby dooby,” he sang, shifting to Drive. He pulled out of the trailer park and headed down the highway for the next neighborhood on his list.

The highway went along the beach. This was a part of the beach that never saw much action at the best of times, and at this time of day it was pretty much deserted. The tide was out. The sand just above the water gleamed white in the bright morning sun, and tiny sandpipers darted up and down. Out to sea a line of pelicans flew low over the waves.

“It’s a beautiful world,” said Joe again. “You have a right to be here.”

He started singing the song “Everything is beautiful in its own way,” which he had never expected to want to sing voluntarily and so had never learned past the first line. “Everything is beautiful in its own way,” sang Joe. “Skooby dooby doo, dooby doo, dooby doo, dooby dooby by doo…” Maybe it had something to do with starting the day with Special K.

He kept driving along, one hand on the wheel, singing the first line of “Everything is beautiful in its own way” and grinning and looking out to sea. The pelicans were just tiny specks in the distance, but the sandpipers were still running up and down.

Years later he could always get a laugh out of an audience telling the story. Because the thing of it is, this is a thing that crosses generations. You take a bunch of guys and maybe for some of them The Man was Elvis, and for some of them it was Jimi Hendrix, and for some of them it was Kurt Cobain, but the thing they all have in common is that they would never sing “Everything is beautiful in its own way” unless someone held a gun to their head (and maybe not even then). Except that every one of those guys will have had the experience of being up at sunrise and going out and being alone in the world and wanting to sing something. He could get a laugh because he only knew the first line of “Everything is beautiful in its own way,” and the other way he could get a laugh was by explaining that he went on to sing “Oh what a beautiful morning,” and he actually knew all the words because his mother drove him crazy playing the record when he was a kid, but he couldn’t quote them in his autobiography because he would have had to have paid a lot of money.

Well, he finished singing “Oh what a beautiful morning” and he found that he had taken his foot off the accelerator. The car was slowing down and he found that he was putting his foot on the brake and turning off the road. He stopped the car on the sandy shoulder and parked it and turned off the engine. He could hear the soft whisper of the waves and the piping of the sandpipers.

There are things that you spell out in words for an audience that you don’t think in words at the time. In his mind he was just seeing the heron with its long sharp beak and spindly legs. He was seeing the sandpipers running up and down the wet sand. He saw the pelicans with their big beaks that could hold a whole fish. They were flying low over the waves because they knew where to find the kind of fish they could put in their beaks.

He opened the door and got out of the car. The Electrolux, with its accessories, sat in the back seat.

He closed the car door and folded his arms on top of the car, looking out to sea. “I don’t have what it takes,” he said. He had never said it before because saying it would be like admitting he couldn’t make the grade. But now he said it and he wasn’t blaming himself. Does a heron go around complaining because it doesn’t have the kind of beak you can stick a whole fish in? Does it say “Where there’s a will there’s a way” and go flying low over the waves, beak or no beak? Like hell it does.

There are guys who can persuade someone they want a new vacuum cleaner even if they have only just bought one. There are guys who can persuade someone they want a new vacuum cleaner even if the vacuum cleaner they have now is more a member of the family than an appliance. In all probability half the people who bought an Electrolux after Hurricane Edna had a perfectly good vacuum cleaner that had come through the hurricane miraculously unscathed. The reason they had bought a new vacuum cleaner was that they had come up against a guy who was born to sell vacuum cleaners. The reason they did not want to buy another vacuum cleaner now was that they were dealing with a guy who did not have what it takes to sell vacuum cleaners.

Well, if you don’t have what it takes you can go on trying to sell vacuum cleaners till the cows come home. When you look back over your life, what you’re going to see is that you ate a lot of pumpkin pie.

If you’re a salesman, you have to deal with yourself the way you are. Not how you’d like to be.

If you don’t have what it takes, you can waste a lot of time asking yourself “How can I get what it takes?” The question you should be asking yourself is, “Is there something else that takes what I have to offer?” Because if there’s something you can succeed at, just the way you are, you won’t have to waste a lot of time trying to change yourself. Which you’re never going to be able to do, anyway.

If you ask most people what’s the hardest thing about being a salesman, they will usually say the rejection. “People always trying to get rid of you,” they say, “that’s what I’d hate.” Or sometimes they say it’s the travel that would really get to them, all those hotel and motel rooms blurring into each other, it must get really lonely. Or sometimes they think it would bother them to be selling things to people that they didn’t really need, pressurizing people into buying things they were not really able to afford.

Well, at one time or another every salesman has probably felt all of those things. But the thing that’s hardest about the job is something you can’t leave behind you by getting another job. A salesman has to see people as they are.

Most people spend their lives trying to avoid doing that very thing. Most people see what they want to see. But a salesman can’t afford to see people the way he might like them to be. He has to see them the way they actually are. And he also has to see them the way they’d like to be. Because no matter how badly people want something, if they don’t want to be the kind of people who want that kind of thing you’re going to have an uphill battle persuading them to buy it. He has to see what it is they don’t like about the way they are and convince them that the way they are is OK. Or he has to see what it is they don’t like and persuade them that he has just the product to fix it. That’s the hardest thing about the job.

Now if you’re selling encyclopedias it’s obvious you’re selling people the idea that they can be what they want to be. But even if you’re selling vacuum cleaners you’re selling people the way they could be—they could be people who will clean their stairs and the furniture and curtains using appropriate attachments, instead of people who could save themselves a couple of hundred bucks by just borrowing a vacuum cleaner for Thanksgiving and Christmas from their next-door neighbors. You’re selling the chance to fix something that’s wrong. What you’re selling, basically, is the idea that there’s nothing wrong with the customer; maybe they don’t know as much as they should, or maybe they happen to live in a dirty house, but that’s just because they don’t have the one thing lacking to put it right.

What you’re selling, obviously, is the idea that if they don’t buy that one thing there is something wrong with them. They could put something right that needs fixing and they chose not to.

The reason it takes a salesman to do this is that left to their own devices most people will just drift along thinking I really should do something about that one of these days. That’s the way people are, and it takes a salesman to get them out of the rut and take some action to actually achieve their goals. It takes a salesman to show them that something they hadn’t thought of as a goal, such as reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica on a regular basis, could be a goal. An achievable goal. The longest journey starts with a single step. In this case, the step of buying the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What this means is that a salesman is constantly confronted with the human capacity for self-deception. He has to recognize that most people will do just about anything rather than face up to the truth about themselves. That’s the hardest thing about the job.

He looked out to sea over the roof of the car. The waves threw down their veils of foam and drew them back, and the sandpipers ran piping over the glistening sand.

He thought: An animal has no shame.

It hunts what it eats and it eats it.

It shits when it needs to. It pees when it needs to. That’s why a parked car gets covered in bird shit. The bird doesn’t wait to find a bathroom. It doesn’t understand the concept of bathroom. It just goes when it needs to.

Then he started to think: But wait a minute, if you see a dog or a cat trying to shit while someone’s watching they look kind of embarrassed. And afterwards a cat will scrape dirt over it. Is that just because it’s left over from the days when the animal would be vulnerable to a predator, or a predator could track it, or something?

And the really interesting thing was that instead of getting side-tracked the way he usually did he just thought: Screw that.

In other words, when something was genuinely important he didn’t get side-tracked. There was something inside him that was able to tell when something was genuinely important.

The thing that was important was that animals have the instinct to mate and they do it without shame.

He thought: Humans do nothing without shame.

Even eating is shameful because it makes you fat. And some things are so shameful you can’t even use a word for them without swearing. You say “go to the bathroom” and “sleep with” because the actual words would be bad language.

What he was thinking, as he watched the sea and the birds, was Look how strong the impulse is! Because you can sell people just about anything if you can convince them it will give them a better chance to get sex. You can sell people just about anything if you can convince them it’s a substitute for sex. The only thing you can’t sell is the actual thing itself. That is, obviously people sell it, but you can’t sell it without shame.

Well, just look at how much time people waste because they can’t get it without shame! Look how much time people waste in conversations, asking people about their interests. Look how much time people waste fantasizing. And just look at the risks people take! Because he had read about a case where a man had harassed a woman by dropping M&M’s in the pocket of her blouse and getting them out, and his firm had to pay her a million dollars. Or it might have been more.

Well, if people are willing to take those kinds of risks you know there’s got to be money in it. And if people are going to do things that put their company at that kind of risk there’s got to be money in it. Plus, if you could give people a way to get it out of their system they would be a whole lot more productive. They’d be happier about themselves. Because there had to be a lot of guys like himself, guys who didn’t want to be spending the amount of time they were spending thinking about sex, guys who given the chance would rather get it out of their system and concentrate their energies on achieving their goals.

Now the way he saw it was, gay men seemed to be able to get it out of their system without too much trouble. Their only problem was there were not that many of them around. But normal men could be in an office full of women without finding an outlet. You have to deal with people the way they are, not the way you’d like them to be, and unfortunately most women did not seem to have the same urges. Or if they did, they wouldn’t admit it. They probably didn’t, anyway. But if they did they wouldn’t admit it.

Because you have to deal with people the way they are, not the way you’d like them to be, and unfortunately most men tend not to respect women who have the same urges they have. Or even if a woman doesn’t have the same urges, but just provides an outlet, men tend not to respect her. Because if you take people the way they are, most men tend to see sticking their dick into someone as a form of domination. To be honest, if you take people the way they are, that’s what they like about it. It’s not just the physical sensation. That’s exactly why masturbation is so unsatisfactory. The physical sensation is pretty much the same. But the domination is all in your head.

So even if a woman wanted the physical sensation just as an outlet she would probably not admit it because of all the aggro.

But the thing to remember was that some women were prepared to provide an outlet, in spite of all the aggro, if the money was right. And lots of guys were prepared to pay, in spite of the aggro. And what the aggro boiled down to, if you thought about it, was the shame of being known to be the person who had been involved. That was why prostitution was so degrading. A prostitute knew that somebody knew she was a prostitute. So whatever else she did with her life, there was always the chance that it would come back to haunt her. And likewise, even if nobody else knew, a man knew that a prostitute knew that he had been to a prostitute.

If you could work out a way to offer anonymity you would have a solution to a disaster that made Hurricane Edna look like a variable breeze.

Now the night before, sitting on the steps, he had thought of a way to offer anonymity and he had decided he was crazy.

What he thought now was: An animal knows no shame.

In other words, the reason he had decided he was crazy was just because he was human. A salesman knows you have to deal with yourself as you are, and that includes a tendency to be ashamed to sell things that society has decided are shameful.

Well, the question to ask yourself is, are they right? And in this case the answer had to be no. A physical urge is a physical urge. What’s shameful is to look the other way and let the devil take the hindmost, instead of dealing with it responsibly. Because the fact was, these unsatisfied urges were causing an incredible amount of wastefulness and suffering. Women were being molested in the workplace solely because their colleagues did not have a legitimate outlet for urges they could not control. Men who had worked hard and who had a valuable contribution to make were being put at risk, through no fault of their own. And it was shame, false shame, that had kept people from dealing effectively with the situation.

Humans are animals, he thought. All these instincts, these incredibly powerful instincts, are just thwarted by all these taboos. If you can break through some of those taboos for people, there’s got to be money in it. A lot of money. But the money is big because those taboos are so strong. Do you have what it takes to break through that, Joe? Do you have what it takes to look someone in the eye when they’re thinking it’s disgusting? Because the thing is, Joe, a big idea is ahead of its time. That’s why there’s money in it. It’s going to be a long, long time before people catch up with you. If they ever do. You’ve got to know you’re right, because they sure as hell won’t. People are going to give you a lot of grief. A lot of grief. So if you can’t take it, Joe, let’s call it quits right here and now.

What he thought was: I don’t know if I have what it takes or not. I’ve never really been tested. I’ve never had the chance to find out what I’m capable of. But I know one thing. It’s one thing to try, and do your best, and fail. All you can ever do is give something your best shot, and sometimes that’s just not enough. But it’s another thing to not even try. This is the first time I’ve had a chance at something really big. If I just walk away from it, what does that make me?

“Look, Joe,” he said. “Let’s not get too serious here. I’m not saying it won’t be a lot of work. But it should be a lot of fun, too. Are you having such a good time selling vacuum cleaners? And OK, you may get some funny looks. But just try to see the humor in it. Besides, at the end of the day, you’re doing everybody a favor. That’s something to feel good about. So just do the best you can, and remember, if it all goes horribly wrong, you can always shoot yourself.”

He was grinning. He slipped off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pants, and he walked up the cool soft sand of the low bank beside the road, and then down onto the beach. The sand near the road was choppy, warm where the sun hit it, cool where the hollows were in shade. Then the sand was firm and ribbed, and then it was flat and wet.

The line of pelicans was coming back along the waves. He watched them, shading his eyes.

“Look at those beautiful birds,” he said. “Is there one single thing wrong with them, Joe? Does a pelican have one single thing to be ashamed of?”

He was walking along in the shallow water. He turned to face the sea and put his hands around his mouth.

“MY NAME IS JOOOOOOOOE!” he shouted. “Yabba dabba DOOOOOOOOOOO!”