How to Make Friends and Exploit People

This memory is a direct sequel to Southwestern Sales Camp

After a very long and tedious overnight bus journey to Pennsylvania, our Greyhound finally arrived in Carlisle early on the Saturday morning. Our colleagues had other destinations, and so Zack and I stepped out alone onto the deserted streets of the city which would be our home for the foreseeable future.

Arriving unannounced in any city presents certain problems, not least finding somewhere to live. We headed to a local branch of Wendy’s for breakfast and Zack immediately came up with the solution: he’d deploy a ‘Southwestern Tip’, one of many we’d been taught during the previous week’s Sales School. The company had advised us to choose a house we liked the look of, knock on the door and explain our situation, and nine times out of ten they’d invite us in to live with them. It sounds like a long shot now, but back then I guess I was a little brainwashed by the company and it seemed like a really good plan. Zack headed off to find somewhere for us to live while I guarded the bags and drank my coffee. With amazing optimism, he reported that he’d be back in five minutes.

After half an hour he still had not returned, and I began to imagine that perhaps he was enjoying a beer with his new housemates; but after an hour he returned with a very grim face. He had tried every house on the street outside without luck, and so we were still homeless. I was literally flabbergasted that the plan had not worked.

This was in the days before internet-enabled mobile phones, so we were at a certain disadvantage in not having the first clue of where in the city we were, or even how the city was laid out. We thus walked in a random direction until we came across a fire station on a quiet street in the suburbs. After we had introduced ourselves – a lengthy process in Carlisle, as you immediately had to explain why you talked funny and then spend five minutes explaining that, yes, you had indeed on one occasion met the Queen – we explained that we were looking for someone to put us up for a few weeks while we sold books door-to-door.

“That won’t happen in Carlisle,” we were told. “Absolutely no fucking way.”

This was not the news I had been hoping for. I was hot, sweaty and hadn’t slept in 24 hours. I wanted to be told there was a bed out back and a fireman would cool me down with the fire hose before I went to sleep. Utterly disheartened, we resigned ourselves to having to get a hotel (eating into our profit margins, a Southwestern no no) and asked the way to the nearest motel. We trudged there under a dark cloud of defeat, strugging in the summer heat with our horribly heavy bags – operating a relay process, in which each bag would progress ten paces up the street in turn. Our moods soon lifted after we checked in, however, as having a shower and changing my clothing was about the best thing to happen to me all week.

We had hit gold with the Days Inn motel, as they handed out complimentary maps of the city. We stocked up on them and employed Southwestern Tip #2: visit a local gas station to ask for directions, and get the information you need on your sales territory. Somehow believing all of this Company Bullshit, we obediently trekked down the busy turnpike to a distant gas station, where a boy of around 15 sold us a single coke.

“Say,” Zack tried. “Tell me, where do all the children live around here?” The gas attendant looked at Zack – understandably – as though he were a paedophile. Zack did not improve matters by adding, “Not the rich ones, the poor ones. With toys and climbing frames strewn across the garden.”

We may have been taught what we were looking for, but we hadn’t been taught to express it well. The boy pretended to find something else to keep him busy in the back of the store, and we left.

Feeling hungry now, we spied a Bonanza Steakhouse across Walnut Bottom Road, a variant of Ponderosa which looked marginally better than the neighbouring McDonalds or Arby’s, so we went in and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu: the all-you-can-eat buffet. This was another massive Company no no – eating out was a waste of money when you could prepare your own food at home. Alas, we had no home, and so instead we learned two very important lessons about America: first, their salad dressings are so creamy and sweet you’ll confuse them for custard; and second, custard tastes utterly foul on salad. The waitress serving us was amused we found the idea of All You Can Eat Buffets and Ranch Dressings so totally alien, and was so taken with our accents I decided I’d have to learn how to speak like an American if we were to achieve anything efficiently in this city (not realising at this stage that our accents would prove our greatest asset).

We returned to our motel reasoning that Day 1 had not been a complete disaster – no one had died, after all – and decided that Day 2 would surely bring some hope. We then phoned Jerry, our team leader, who was appalled. “You have to get out of that motel tomorrow,” he explained. “You are supposed to be making money, not spending it.”

My thoughts were pretty much “Fuck yourself wrongways, Jerry”, but of course I responded politely and hoped the man would get off our backs. We went to explore the motel and came across the gym, where I had my first (largely unsuccesful) go on a treadmill, which to a country boy like me was akin to finding the battleship galactica behind the wardrobe. America really did seem to be a place where dreams could come true.

We slept soundly that night, and I think Imaginary God must have heard our prayers as I pulled open the curtains early the following morning to reveal – bathed in light across the parking lot – a church. The board outside announced in giant letters that morning communion was at 9pm. Perfect, time to implement Southwestern Tip #3: Americans will trust you if you affect a belief in their god.

As per Southwestern Tip #4, we dressed in our preppiest outfits – chinos, crisply ironed blue shirts, nicely polished shoes (not trainers) – and headed down to the church for 8am hoping to catch the priest or pastor or preacher or whatever the hell they’re called and see if he’d mention our appeal during his service.

After confirming to his apparent satisfaction that we were good god-fearing children, the priest said he would be happy to help us. He also suggested we might like to attend the Sunday school bible study class and - not wishing to offend - we immediately agreed. It didn’t once cross my mind that this might be some sort of test to check our credentials.

It is probably worth at this point noting that as two relatively healthy, slim Cambridge-educated men in their early twenties we looked nothing like the men of a similar age who derived from local Germanic stock, who had been brought up on a diet of cream and sugar. We were thus assumed to be around 16, and we did nothing to challenge this assumption. Similarly, we had the edge in bible class as the average 16 year old in Carlisle has not recently graduated with a degree from Cambridge. It was therefore almost impossible not to shine in bible class, depsite never having read or been taught about the bible before.

The class was effectively a basic comprehension exercise in which a passage was read out and then we were asked what had just been said. There were only two local boys in the class, sullen and near mute creatures which made hopeless guesses at the answers. Zack and I by comparison must have seemed about as knowledgeable of matters biblical as the Pope.

This was swiftly followed by church, which was just like chapel in Cambridge only instead of a glug of port followed by a croissant, communion took the form of grape juice and a ritz cracker. I was heartbroken, as the only thing getting me through the service was the thought of a red-wine shooter. It was later explained that we were at the Church of Christ, a wholly abstinent institution which translated the word ‘wine’ in the bible as ‘fruit of the vine’ – as though Jesus might seriously have been celebrated at the wedding in Cana for turning water into a grape. Anyway, afterwards the preacher made an appeal for god fearing peoples to house us, and much to our surprise an elderly couple volunteered.

We met with Dan and Lucy in the car park outside, and they were absolutely lovely. They set the tenancy terms there and then – a dollar’s rent a week each – and they left to prepare their house. In the meantime, the man who’d led the bible study class offered to take us to his house for Sunday lunch. There’s obviously good money in religion, as their house was absolutely huge. His wife was a charming and funny woman, and as we sat down for Sunday lunch with them we met their daughters, one of whom was the waitress from the Bonanza Steak House the night before. Somehow we had gone from being homeless and friendless to having a surrogate family, all in just one day. Perhaps there was something to the Southwestern Tips after all, or perhaps religious people are just very easy to take advantage of.

After a meal of boiled beef and boiled potatoes (okay, so it wasn’t delicious food, but at least it was wholesome) and a pint of ‘sun tea’ brewed fresh in the garden, the husband and wife drove us to K-Mart to buy a few last minute items. The shop was vast and unlike anything I had ever seen before. I picked up a watch for $5 (which is still one of my favourites), while Zack needed to buy a pair of shorts. As I mentioned above, Zack was not of Germanic stock and was not brought up on cream and sugar, and so he ended up having to buy his shorts from the childrenswear department. They were very cute.

We picked our things up from the motel and then headed on to York Road to meet our new family properly. Lucy and Dan were more welcoming than we had any reason to expect, although they did have their quirks (not least several cats tied on leads to the kitchen door, and a home-made electronic alarm that screamed if anyone or thing passed the kitchen window). We had a quick tour of their house which had been extended in piecemeal fashion over the years to create a strange network of little rooms. My favourite space was at the back – the ‘deck’, a large covered platform filled with comfortable chairs and enclosed by bug screens. The deck served as the main living area, while the three living rooms towards the front of the house were dark and cramped and filled with dusty nick-nacks (including Dan’s favourite: a boat carved from the skull of an American GI, its little sail made from said GI’s skin with tasteful tattoo detail, which Dan had picked up when his battalion was sent to Hiroshima to clean up after the atomic bomb).

My room was formerly their daughter’s, and was a lovely airy space with plenty of room. Zack meanwhile was in a box room, sleeping on a bed so soft you sank down through it and onto the floor.

When we called Jerry that evening he was very proud of what we achieved, and gave us a pep talk. On Day 3 – a Monday – we therefore rose enthusiastically at 7am for our cold shower and meagre breakfast, ready for our first day of actual, real sales. Only as I write this do I realise how much I had really been brainwashed by the company. Despite considering myself a sceptic I still at the point actually believed we could be a success.

And so it was that I walked out into the world with a hefty bookbag over one shoulder, settled on the rather charmingly named Gobin Street as a starting point, and followed the Southwestern guidance: I carefully drew the street into my pad, marked on each of the houses and noted any key features (paddling pools, climbing frames). I steeled myself, marched up to the first door, put on my brightest smile, knocked three times firmly, took two steps back and turned to the side and waited.

The door opened.

“Good morning-“ I started, but already the door had been slammed shut. I burst into tears, and it was then that my enthusiasm for the project began to go down hill.

[Time: Summer of 1997]