The Girls of Cincinnati Page 2

“Sounds like fun.”

  “No it isn’t,” she said grimly.

  “Whatever you say.”

  She said it was a curse, seeing the future; had cost her all her friends. Even her family.

  “My mother threw me out of the house,” she said.

  I didn’t want to know why.

  “I predicted my father’s death.”

  I drew a deep breath. I already knew more than I wanted to know.

  You shouldn’t know too much about people. Really, there’s only so much room for other people’s lives. Your own life is trouble enough.

  She had predicted her father’s death. This was not good news.

  I said, “Lucky guess maybe.”

  “I see your future, too,” she said.

  This I had not bargained for.

  “I don’t want to know my future,” I said.

  “Most people do.”

  “I don’t.”

  But of course now I did. What the hell was she seeing, staring at me like that?

  “You’re very much in love,” she said.

  “Most people are, off and on. You caught me on.”

  “She’s very beautiful, but I see danger.”

  I gave her a sick smile. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “Grave danger,” she said.

  “Please go to your desk.”

  “Don’t you want to hear what’s going to happen to her?”

  “No I do not.”

  “It might help,” she said, “if you knew it was coming.”

  “Nothing’s coming. I don’t believe in this stuff.”

  She lowered her eyes, and grew very sad.

  “Do you want me to leave? I can see I’m scaring you.”

  On that score you didn’t have to be psychic. I was scared.

  “Just say the word,” she said, “and I’ll go home.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “I’ll just go to my desk, all right? I’ve kept you long enough.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  I should have quit while I was ahead. But I’m an actor or so I keep telling myself and we need the motivation.

  “Stephanie,” she said.

  Another lucky guess, I figured, or she could have asked around, except that she hadn’t talked to the other girls yet. Which didn’t mean that there weren’t a thousand other ways to find things out. There was also the chance, of course, that she had arrived at Stephanie’s name through supernatural sources, from heaven or from hell. From the looks of this girl it had to be hell. My guess was that she saw grave danger for everybody…and if it was death that she saw she had to be on target, sooner or later, 100 percent of the time, and about the same percentage for all manner of illness and tragedy, since nobody went through life unscathed. But who asked? I didn’t. If it was anything bad, I didn’t want to hear it, especially about Stephanie.

  “She’s not going to die,” Sonja said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking.”

  “But it might be much worse.”

  Wonderful. Exactly what I needed to hear.

  “Jesus Christ, lady, I don’t want this!”

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  At this point, yes, very much. Place an ad in the paper and this is what you get. You never know. Takes all kinds all right and the longer you live the more of them you meet, from the top down to the bottom. Stephanie, of course, had been the top, or top-of-the-line as we say here in the rug business. Letting this one go, before she intruded too deeply into my life – and actually she had already done considerable damage, me wondering what tragedy was in store for Stephanie – would be the smart thing to do, but I wasn’t always smart, if I was I wouldn’t be here at Harry’s Carpet City in Cincinnati, Ohio, I’d be on Broadway, and besides, she started to cry. I knew it was fake, a performance, but the other girls stopped dialing. Girls drew together, they bonded when one of them started to cry. Usually it was weeks or months before I had them crying. Mona – the mother of us all here at Harry’s boiler room – was casting me the hard eye. Mona was like Will Rogers, only better. She never met a man, or woman, she didn’t like.

  I wasn’t quite so generous though there was this from Philo: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

  “Only one thing I ask,” I said to Sonja Frick. I was always suspicious of girls who didn’t have regular names, anyway, like Mary or Sue. With a name like Sonja there had to be trouble. Yes, what’s with that name, Sonja? Mystics say that a name tells everything about a person. An ox is an ox because it’s an ox. I always thought a name like that, like Sonja, came from Slovakia or something, not that I ever thought about it that much. Never did, in fact, before now.

  “Yes?” she whispered.

  “No more of that psychic stuff.”

  “But I can’t help it,” she said. “It’s a gift. Or a curse.”

  “Well I don’t want to know what’s going to happen.”

  “I won’t tell unless you ask.”

  “Well I won’t ask.”

  “People always say that,” she said, smiling. She got up and walked to her desk, strangely confident.

  * * *

  Nice ass. I happened to be strictly an ass man.

  But no, I thought. Not this one. With this one sex would just be the start of something or other.

  * * *

  Fat Jack was on the phone.

  “Guess who’s coming today?”

  “Stop this, Fat Jack. I’m not in the mood.”

  “Not in the mood for Stephanie? She called me.”

  “Sure she did.”

  How many times could he play this trick? He knew what it did to me just to mention her name. Did he do it for the thrills? His thrills or mine?

  “I swear it’s true,” he said. “She’s coming, today. Just got off the phone with her.”

  “Knock it off.”

  “Will you two get it right this time?”

  “Business must be slow,” I said.

  Chapter 3

  Downstairs in the showroom Fat Jack was holding another conference with the salesmen, who were doing all the listening, Fat Jack all the talking, as was the case at least once a week, or when business was especially bad – and it always was. Business was never good. Ask any merchant. Business is always bad. Here, every day is our last. We’re always going out of business.

  “Another pep talk,” groaned Morris Silver out of hearing range, though it always turned out that Fat Jack heard everything.

  “When he was in diapers,” Morris Silver said, “I was selling burial plots door-to-door in Price Hill and all around this town, making a mint off those suckers. I was selling holes in the ground, understand! Holes in the ground! Now THAT’S selling. No young pischer talks to me about being a salesman. When he was crawling on this very table I was the first member of the Million Dollar Club here. I outsold Harry Himself.”

  Harry Monocle was owner and founder of Harry’s Carpet City and was usually referred to as Harry Himself.

  Anyway, Morris Silver hadn’t had a million dollar year in quite a while, like never again, for example. His best years were behind him, as opposed to, say, young Phil Coleman, one of three members of last year’s Million Dollar Club, who had received a medal, from Harry Himself, for his million dollars worth of sales. He was an ACHIEVER.

  Phil Coleman, sometimes known as Hot Shot, said, “Give the kid a chance. He’s paid his dues.”

  Which was true. Back when he was still making calls, Fat Jack was the best carpet salesman in the business.

  A true salesman, Harry Himself always said, is a person who sells you what you need, and what you don’t need. That’s a true salesman.

  “Bar none,” Fat Jack was saying to the assembled about his preeminence, speaking in that loud raspy voice, using his arms for emphasis and fingers for exclamation marks, much in the frantic style of Harry Monocle himself, who no longer did the day-to-day… but when he us
ed to, boy could he give pep talks! Salesmen from competing shops used to sneak in just to get a whiff of that fire and brimstone. Everything Fat Jack knew came from Harry Himself. Harry Himself was a legend in the carpet business, now mostly retired, or rather, like God Himself, lofted to the upper heavens. In this case the fourth floor.

  Harry Himself was a genius, the Einstein of sales. Even half retired, he still kept up, always suggesting new slogans and campaigns. When the Ohio River washed up miles away, he came up with a Flood Sale, though nothing here flooded, of course. He liked to say… BAD TASTE IS GOOD BUSINESS. That was his motto. Well, he had many mottos.

  Actually, who could argue? He was a success, wasn’t he? Who can argue with success? That’s what people say.

  There’s no arguing with failure, either.

  “That’s right,” Fat Jack was saying. “I could outsell you bums blindfolded, hands tied behind my aching back, and that includes you Phil, and Jake, and Roger.” The Big Three. Send them out on a lead for a lousy bedroom measurement and they came back with an order for wall-to-wall, the essence of selling what wasn’t needed. “Don’t laugh,” Fat Jack was saying. “That’s why Harry Himself made me manager and not you. Because I was the best. I’m still the best. You guys – what are you? Order takers?”

  Now THAT was an insult, along the lines of calling a doctor a quack, a lawyer a shyster – only this was much worse, for an order taker was nothing more than a clerk, a guy who only sold what you needed. Where was the skill or the thrill in that – or the money? Or the pride? Or the SUCCESS!

  “If I’m insulting you,” Fat Jack was saying, “good.”

  Of all the salesmen here, standing at attention, no one was more insulted than Old Lou Emmett whose reputation differed from the Big Three’s in that when he had a great lead and went out for a wall-to-wall job he usually came back with a bedroom sale, and sometimes worse, like nothing.

  But it wasn’t always that way.

  So Old Lou piped up:

  “I’ve been in this organization thirty-five years and never has anyone called me an order taker.”

  Fat Jack smiled along with everybody else, seeing Old Lou getting himself so riled, stuttering and sputtering, a bad thing, since Lou had had a heart attack, and then on top of that, a stroke, so that now he was only a fraction of his old self. He could barely walk and talk, but still went out on calls out of the bigness of Fat Jack’s heart. He was the company’s charity case. The good thing and the bad thing about Lou was that he refused to acknowledge his diminished faculties and even denied, to himself and to the world, that he had been the victim of a heart attack, and a stroke. (Weeks apart.)

  So nobody mentioned it to his face, that he was a cripple, except Fat Jack, of course. Fat Jack…Fat Jack had no couth. People shook their heads and rolled their eyes when they saw Old Lou shuffling by. (No cane for him.) Well, a few of the salesmen, like Phil Coleman, and even some customers, actually made fun of him, upon the assumption that they were immune from infirmity and old age. Some people thought those things only happened to Lou Emmett. (Just wait, Lou used to whisper to me. Everybody gets a turn.)

  “I used to be big,” said Lou in front of everybody. “I’m still big.”

  “I didn’t mean you,” Fat Jack said humbly, about Lou’s being an order taker, and it was some doing for Fat Jack to be humble.

  “You got that right,” said Lou, as everybody smiled and snickered.

  “We all remember you in your days of glory, Lou. We REALLY do.”

  Old Lou wasn’t finished. “Nobody but nobody was my equal.”

  Nobody But Nobody was Fat Jack’s TV ad campaign, as in “Nobody but Nobody Undersells Harry’s Carpet City.”

  Fat Jack got that from Harry Himself, of course, another of Harry’s mottos.

  “In your day,” said Fat Jack, getting less humble.

  “What do you mean my day?” said Old Lou. “I’m as good today as I ever was.”

  “That’s right, Lou. Now let me finish with these bums.”

  “Can I help it,” said Lou, “if I get lousy leads? The bottom of the barrel? That’s all I get.”

  All eyes turned to me. “You hear that, Eli?” Fat Jack said, eyes bright with wickedness and humor. How he loved to rub it in!

  “I heard,” I said.

  “We need those leads from you, Eli.”

  “You’re getting them.”

  “My men are STARVING, Eli,” Fat Jack said in a flourish.

  “They’re getting leads.”

  “I mean verified leads.”

  “We’re verifying them.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Well you’ll have to do better, Eli. We need Hyde Park wall-to-wall, not Over the Rhine linoleum. Get some new broads up there, or something. Fresh blood. Whenever I see them, that crew you’ve got up there now, they’re going to the bathroom. That’s time, time wasted. They spend more hours in the john than upstairs in your boiler room.”

  He had me there, but there really was no cool way to tell girls not to go to the bathroom.

  Besides, it was against the law.

  Go ahead, tell a woman she can’t go to the bathroom, no matter how often she goes.

  Fat Jack, back to the room at large, resumed: “We all have to do better. These are tough economic times. You’re all lucky to have a job, thanks to Harry Himself and his generosity. There is only one way to survive. SELL, SELL, SELL! Otherwise you die. It’s not like the old days when you could just…”

  Everybody always talked about the old days, as if there really were such a thing.

  Chapter 4

  Upstairs in the boiler room the girls were at their desks working the phones, pitching carpet to the world from a spiel I had written and which had not yet won the Nobel Prize for Literature or for Carpet. Fat Jack had made me read some book that taught POWER words. There were, for instance, no savings, only INCREDIBLE savings.

  That was most of my job, updating the spiel, running the place and verifying the leads, which I hardly did anymore, I let Mona do it, most of it, because I was too bashful. I hated talking to strangers and I only had one friend. Actually I was ashamed to still be in the carpet business when some people I knew were already getting published, arguing cases before the Supreme Court, appearing on Broadway. The even more successful ones, like the bankers, industrialists and stockbrokers of my generation, were doing even better; they were already in jail!

  Where was I? Running a boiler room.

  Fat Jack knew the secret, that I never made calls myself, except to verify once in a while.

  He said, “You’re too shy? So put on an act. You’re an actor.” But he never insisted.

  Lou was at my desk and he was sweating. The air conditioner never worked properly up here and heat rises, for sure, that was one reason, the other being that Lou liked to sweat. He always carried a big handkerchief and it was always soaked. He was also exhausted from the trek up, three flights, his daily Mount Everest.

  What most people took for granted, he, now a handicapped man, had to conquer. That’s how it was for him. He once confided in me the terror of walking down the wide-apart steps of a bus, and a million other things that you never thought about when you were healthy. Think about that, he liked to say. I’d rather not. Be glad you’re healthy, he liked to say. Well, there is this health and there is that health. Nobody’s really all that healthy.

  “Sorry about that,” he said, now seated next to me.

  “That’s okay, Lou.”

  “I shouldn’t have put you on the spot like that, in front of everybody.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “You’re a pal.”

  “What are pals for?”

  “I didn’t think Fat Jack would make a federal case out of it, you know. But you know Fat Jack.”

  “Yeah I know Fat Jack.”

  “I’m not complaining about your leads. I know the girls are trying. Anything for me today?”

  I turn
ed to Mona. “Anything happening?”

  “No,” she said. “Slow, very slow. But we’re getting a lot of callbacks. How you feeling, Lou?”

  Lou tightened up. “What do you mean how am I feeling? I’m feeling fine. Just fine.”

  “Saww-ry,” she said, growing red hot in the face. Nobody got flustered as easily as Mona, who was only in her late 40s, married, kids, but a virgin in every other way, as matronly a Cincinnatian as could be found, the kind of person, terrific as she was, who made you wonder – how does this person have sex? It’s all so improper and unladylike. But she did have kids, so something happened.

  Old Lou was angry. People were always asking him how he felt. “How are YOU feeling, Mona?”

  “I’m sorry, Lou. I was just trying to be sociable.”

  Mona hastily got back to her dialing. Mona hated conflict, of any kind. True blue Cincinnati. Yes, there were those riots and our cops occasionally make the national headlines (not in a good way) but like Mona, Cincinnati likes to keep to itself and blushes when it gets too much attention. We don’t like fame here in the Midwest. We don’t have Broadway and we don’t do lunch. We like beer, peanuts, baseball and patriotism.

  Cleveland, actually, is another planet. It’s amazing that we share the same state and the same language. Our relatives live right across the river or forgot to catch the boat from Deutschland. Plenty of us are still upstanding German/Americans and enough of us are hillbillies. You got a problem with that? We don’t really care what goes on over there in Cleveland or any other place.

  We’re tucked nice and cuddly in the middle of this great country, this great world. We figure – you don’t bother us, we don’t bother you. Okay?

  “What’s the matter with your people?” Lou asked confidentially.

  “What do you mean my people?”

  “Well they’re your girls.”

  “My girls? What do you mean my girls?”

  “Never mind.”

  “She was only being polite.”

  “I don’t need people feeling sorry for me.”

  “She only asked how you were feeling, Lou.”

  “Well I know what she means by that.”