See, that’s one of the fringe benefits of selling termite extermination service door to door. You become very tolerant of people.
Anyhow, I was less interested in accompanying Lester to the bus station than in seeing the movie with Keegan and Jimmy Joe. There was one other member of the crew, a recently divorced ex-Marine named Solly, who was inclined to have much better luck with women than the rest of us. He was having some of that luck right now in his motel room. And Flickinger, the crew leader, was doing what he always did after sunset. What he did involved a bottle and a glass. He never minded company, but if you were going to sit with him he expected you to drink with him, and even without trying to match him shot for shot I was in big trouble, because if I took a short drink for every three long ones of his I would still be drunk in an hour and sick for the next day and a half. One drink of Gregor’s lousy brandy was all right, but I wasn’t ready to handle anything like a whole night of serious drinking.
Besides, as I discovered the second of the two times I had kept Flick company, he never remembered in the morning just what he had said the night before. He never said anything particularly weird either of the times I was with him, and he behaved the same as he did when he was cold sober — he never took a drink before the sun went down, or passed one up after it did — but the thing of it was that he wouldn’t know one night that he had told you certain stories on an earlier night, and anecdotes that are fairly lively the first time around get a little stale the second time.
And if you tried to tell Flick that you’d heard such and such a story before, he argued with you.
So I didn’t go to Flick’s room, and of course I didn’t go to Solly’s room, and the other three guys were out somewhere, and I didn’t have anything to read, and Flick owned the only car and had let Jimmy Joe and Keegan borrow it, which didn’t really enter into it since I couldn’t drive anyway. Well, I mean I know how, but they get agitated if they catch you driving without a license, and I never got one.
So there was nothing to do and no place to go, and that gave this particular evening a whole lot in common with most of the evenings I’d spent since I left Chicago.
Unless you happened to work on one of those traveling sales crews, you probably don’t know what they’re like. I didn’t have the faintest idea myself until I was actually hired and on the job. The arrangement was simple enough. The crew consisted of five guys anywhere from eighteen on up (well, I lied) and a crew leader. You would be assigned a certain territory, which in our case was eastern Illinois and western Indiana, and within that territory you would go wherever the crew boss decided and stay as long as it was worthwhile. The crew leader took care of all your regular expenses — hotel, meals, car expenses, and so on — and got reimbursed by the company.
For every sale you made, the salesman got twenty-five dollars and the crew leader got fifteen. The crew leader did his own selling too and got to keep the whole forty bucks on his own sales. (Flick’s percentage was officially a secret, but it was one of the first things he told you when he sat drinking with you.)
The point is that if you made a sale you wound up with twenty-five bucks free and clear, since you didn’t have any living expenses at all. If you sold one lousy exterminating job a day, you could salt away better than five hundred dollars a month. And on the other hand if you had a terrible day or a terrible week or even a terrible month, you never had to worry about missing meals or being locked out of your room, because your basic expenses were always taken care of.
I just read through that last paragraph, and it sounds as good now as it did when I first heard it. Because I haven’t mentioned the one thing they didn’t stress, either.
Which is that you go out as a crew for a three month tour, and you don’t collect nickel number one until you finish the tour. It wasn’t hard to figure out why they did it this way. See, the system was based on the idea of five men and a crew boss, which was the best size group from an economic standpoint. And if two or three of those men decided to call it quits while the crew was working off in East Crayfish or Fort Dingbat, the whole crew stopped being a profitable deal for the company. But if a guy had to go back at the end of the hitch to collect his money, that tended to discourage him from quitting.
Of course you would still be entitled to your pay whether you quit or not. But being entitled didn’t mean anybody was going to hand the money to you.
Or, in Flick’s words, “Any of youse quits without the three months are up, you just kissed your dough goodbye. And if I ever catches youse again, you can kiss your ass goodbye, too, because I’ll kick it clear to Wausau County for you.”
I don’t know where the hell Wausau County is.
According to Keegan, who had been working what he called the Bug Game on and off for almost five years, there was another reason why they didn’t pay you until your shift was done. They had to confirm the signatures. Otherwise the salesmen could just write up a couple of phony orders every day, knock down a couple of hundred dollars a week, and spend all their time watching television.
“And there are some that would do just that,” he told me, with a wink. “You wouldn’t believe it in a fine upstanding business like this one, Chip my lad, but there are hordes of dishonest people in this world.”
I believed it.
Not that I had ever had any grave doubts on that score. But in the time I spent showing poor widow ladies my little plastic tube full of termites, I learned more about how people could be crooked without going to jail than I ever knew existed. One thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was that my parents must have been real hardcore criminals. Up until then I always figured that they couldn’t have been so bad if they went all their lives without getting sent to jail, but now I saw that I had been looking at it the wrong way around. If they had actually gotten themselves to a point where it looked as though they just might have to go to jail, then they were obviously a pretty criminal pair, old Mom and Dad, because you can be crooked enough to pull corks out of wine bottles with your toes and never see a cop except to say hello to, or fix a traffic ticket.
I already knew that nobody seemed to pay any attention to the law, or at least not in the way the law had in mind. In Chicago, for instance, you couldn’t do commercial street photography, and even if you did you couldn’t pass out handbills that way, because that constitutes an invitation to litter and means you’re creating a nuisance. All of which meant that Gregor gave the patrolman on his beat ten dollars a week and never heard any more about it.
(I had always known things like this went on, but I thought, you know, that it was strictly Big Time Criminals who got involved in them. Not some plodding clod like Gregor, for Pete’s sake. And I knew some cops took graft, and how it’s a big temptation and all, but to take ten dollars? A rotten ten dollars from a simp like Gregor?)
Well, this happens in more places than Chicago. In every city or town our crew went to, there was a man Flickinger called the Fixer. The Fixer might be somebody in the police department or sheriff’s office, or it might be a politician, or it might be some lawyer or businessman who was in good with the local government. And whoever the particular fixer might be, Flick would tell him he was bringing in a door-to-door crew and he wanted to have all the red tape handled in advance, like the permits or licenses or whatever was needed, and without the bother of filling out a lot of forms. And then Flick would slip the Fixer an envelope, and the Fixer would talk to whoever had to be talked to, and he’d keep part of what was in the envelope and pass on the rest, and none of us would have to worry about any aggravation from the police. And I don’t mean just that they wouldn’t give us a hard time about not having licenses. Besides that, there was always the fact that a certain number of non-customers would call the cops and complain about us for one reason or another. But the word would be out, and when those calls came in the cop who answered the phone would say Yeah and Sure, ma’am and listen while all the information came over the wire and into his ear, but he wouldn’t bother writing any of it down, and we would never even hear about it, unless maybe someone would call Flick privately and ask him to for Christ’s sake ask his boys to be a little more diplomatic in their dealings with the natives.