“I been on the road for thirty years and more, kid, and if I learned one thing it’s you don’t lose money by ringing doorbells. And if there’s one word of advice I can give you it’s never get into any woman’s pants without she signs on the dotted line. Once you got the order written it’s another story. With the sale made you can afford half an hour in the kip, even an hour if you like the broad’s style. But without you get the order there’s no percentage. You just waste time you can’t afford, and then all she wants to do is get you out of there without she buys anything, or else she keeps you around and gives you coffee and dangles it in front of you that maybe she’ll buy, and you wind up going another round in the kip, and you waste the whole fucking afternoon without you get any order at all. Now maybe you’ll give her a kiss or a feel to set up a sale, on the lines of what you might call a free sample, but that’s all. If there’s one word of advice I can give you that’s it.”
Good old Flick. The first time I heard that little speech I saw myself giving in gracefully to one woman after the next, and doing so well in bed with them that I got order after order, and — Well, there’s no big suspense to keep up, since Francine wasn’t in the picture yet and you know I was still as pure as Ivory Soap when I met her, so let’s just say that it wasn’t like that at all in the door-to-door game, at least not for me, and while Flick’s advice might have been sound, I wasn’t getting a chance to put it into practice.
“As I said, I got doors closed in my face, and I also got the usual percentage of dimwits who felt sorry enough for me to let me give them the whole speech, but who didn’t feel sorry enough for me to let me sell them anything. And then just before it was time to quit I hooked a gray-haired lady who lived all alone in a Victorian house that must have had a hundred rooms in it. She had a cat, but it said what any normal cat says. She said its name was Featherfoot, and that it was a boy but she had had it fixed. She said it so daintily that I almost asked what had been wrong with it. She also had had it declawed so it wouldn’t ruin the furniture. She might have gone all the way and had it stuffed so that it wouldn’t go to the bathroom and to cut down on the cost of feeding it. If I ever have a cat, which I probably won’t, since it’s hard enough to keep myself in sardines, let alone two of us, I would let it keep its claws and its balls intact. I mean, if you don’t want the complete animal, I don’t think you should have any of it. I mean, how would you like it if you were a cat and they did that to you?
That’s getting off the subject, but so did this old lady. She went on and on about one thing or another. She had lost her husband a year ago, she told me. I was sort of listening to every third word out of her mouth, so I thought at first that she must have lost him in one of the hundred rooms in that old barn. But of course she meant he was dead. I hate people who don’t like to say certain words, so they say that the cat is fixed when they mean castrated, or that their husband is lost when they mean he’s dead as a doornail.
She kept on talking, and I went around the house on a tour of inspection, and she droned on about how much trouble there was in keeping up a house when you were a woman all alone in the world. I knew I had her then. I worked my way around the back of the house until I found a spot where there were traces of sawdust on the concrete, and I whipped out my magnifying glass and made clucking noises.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, land’s sake.”
I pointed to the sawdust. “See that?” I said.
She saw it and started apologizing for never having noticed it before. I developed a sudden thirst and asked her if she thought I might be able to have a glass of water. When she came back with the water, I showed her a test tube half full of the little rascals. She almost spilled the water.
“Oh, dear. And you captured all of them while I was in the house?”
“That’s right. There are some of the ones I missed. See, there they go.”
She looked, tsstssing unhappily as the little devils scurried madly over the clapboard siding. That was always the real convincer. Even the most gullible person could look at the ones in the test tube and still figure his house was safe. There was always the hope in their minds that I had picked up the last of them. And the suspicious ones might point out that I could have brought the test tube along with me. But when they saw those termites actually burrowing into their own house it got them where they lived. No joke, it really did.
We went in the house and I filled out the service agreement and got her to sign it. She didn’t even ask what the job was going to cost until after I had the agreement folded and tucked away. I said that the price would depend upon the extent of infestation, and that our costs were nominal, and that all our work was guaranteed. This didn’t answer her question but she didn’t ask again, so I guess she thought she was satisfied.
Before I could get out of there she asked to see the termites again. I gave her the tube. “Nasty nasty vicious things,” she said, with all the hate in the world in her voice. And wouldn’t you know that she insisted on taking the tube outside and spilling the devils out onto the sidewalk and then dive-bombing the living shit out of them with a can of spray insect killer. “Die die die,” she said, and the poor little critters curled up and did just that.
It was a nuisance, but no real harm done. Flickinger had a five-gallon pickle jug swarming with the little bastards, and it wasn’t that much trouble to get a tubeful of them. A pain in the neck, that’s all.
That night I sat around the motel after I refilled the test tube. Jimmy Joe and Keegan were at a movie I hadn’t wanted to see. Lester went off without saying where, probably to look for queers at the bus station. He liked girls and his suitcase was half full of pictures of naked women, but queers were always easier to find, even in the fifth largest city in Indiana, which is where we happened to be just then. You could jump off the top of the tallest building in the fifth largest city in Indiana without doing much more than spraining your ankle, but for our crew this was considered a pretty big city. We worked towns you honestly wouldn’t believe. We went all through Illinois and Indiana, and sometimes the towns were so small that Lester had to find himself the one queer in the town, or what you might call the town’s faggot in residence. But he always seemed to connect.
The reason I could tolerate old Lester was that he had a reasonable attitude about what he did. He didn’t run on and on about it and he didn’t bug you with a lot of details you’d be a lot happier not knowing, but at the same time he wasn’t one of those nerds who did it on the sly, like my old roommate Haskell who tried to pretend his cock and his hand had never even been introduced to one another, for Pete’s sake. If you asked him a question he’d answer it, but if you left it alone he’d keep quiet. This made him relatively easy to take.
As far as Lester was concerned there was nothing revolting about going with a queer. The only thing shameful about it was that it would be a lot better and more satisfying with a girl. But he didn’t figure it made him queer to be with a queer. Not that Lester is the first person on earth to ever come up with this line of thought. But it seems to me, if you happen to care, that when two men had sex together they were both queer and it didn’t make a hell of a difference which one was down on his knees. It wasn’t as though Lester was just phoning in his part of the deal. But whether you wanted to consider him queer or not (and if you did it wasn’t a good idea to tell him about it), I got along fine with him.