TWO-SALE DAY

Somebody should have figured it out after I brought in the Barbra Streisand album.

I just couldn’t stand hearing Brazil ’66 another minute on those long drives to the far ends of the mid-South in the Ford Galaxie. We sold encyclopedias door-to-door from a home base in Memphis, but most of the sales came from small towns that dotted the highways veining out in all directions, into Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi.

“Just look at that sign,” Matt Borzello would shout in his New York accent, pointing out the window. “Caution Slow Children” he would say, “They need these books. Get out there and sell!”

He would drop each one of us off at a different corner to prowl for suckers and drunks and bored housewives, anyone willing to open the door and let us in. If you could get the pitch started, you had a 50-50 chance of closing the sale.

Like many a Friday night that summer, we met up at the office on Front Street, down by the iced tea Mississippi in a seedy office building a few blocks from the Holiday Inn World Headquarters. It was a road trip, so Matt told us to pack a bag. We were a crew. There was Sam, who never said a word, I never learned where he was from, but boy could he sell encyclopedias! Maybe it was the trophy freckles and the Southern white boy manner. There was Bobby, like me about to enter the last year of high school, only he would be spanking in Memphis, and I would go back to Louisville. And there was Dave, the big linebacker from Tunica, Mississippi, who had turned down football offers from both Tennessee and Alabama, or so he said. He was at puny Tunica Junior College instead, just to spite his Daddy.

Dave had been at me all summer to get laid. I don’t know how he knew I was a virgin. When it was our turn to sit in the back of the Ford together, he would talk about his wife Janelle, a sexy rich daughter of some kind of plantation gentry class they were both part of. A beauty queen, Miss Milk Jugs of 1963, something like that.

That weekend when we finished selling dirt, Janelle was going to pick up me and Dave for a blind double date with her brunette successor, Miss Milk Jugs of 1964.
I had a bang-up Saturday in Nashville --- my first two-sale day ever, bringing my weekly total up to four and a chance for the prize money they gave each week on top of the big commissions. Most of the money the suckers spent on those books went for commissions.

Bobby was my roomy in the cheesy motel. We were ready to collapse onto the linens after the hot day of pavement pounding and door knocking. We peeled down to skivvies and crawled under the polyester covers of the queen-sized bed.

This is the part where I describe the endless hours of arousal and rolling around, half sleeping, hard all night, wanting/not-wanting, frightened, touching, aching but never acting, pretending that neither of us wanted to electrify each other, ending the long winters of our bodies and our souls.

Sometime near dawn, he peeled back the sweaty sheets to tiptoe to the bathroom, failing to hide his erection as he passed by my side of the bed. Our eyes never met, not then, not as we packed up, not in the tacky coffee shop, not in the back seat of the Galaxie on the way back to Memphis, not ever once again. Neither of us could take it.

Matt was driving down the Interstate like a madman He wanted to get back to his wife Lydia, a local Memphis bottle blonde with a big voice and a bigger chest; Matt adored her. She sang freelance backup at the Memphis studios. Her biggest gig had been singing behind Lou Christie on Rhapsody in the Rain, I loved that record. Matt didn’t have it on 8-track for the ride home, only those damn instrumentals. Which is why I bought the Barbara Streisand in the first place.

Barbra san her heart out as we finished our take-out sandwiches and passed around a bottle of vodka to wash down the potato chips and cookies and the rest of the junk food.

The vodka was a bad idea, especially for Matt, who only had half a stomach left, some kind of surgery back East. The rest of us were shit-faced by the time we took the cut-off for Memphis. God only knows how Matt managed to stay on the road and avoid the arrest that he deserved.

I didn’t know why Matt drank so much, but then, I didn’t really know why I did either. It sure made it easier not to look at Bobby, who sat eating chips and staring out the window on his side of the car. I guess they call it a blackout, what descended upon me as the vodka took me hostage.

By the time we made it to Matt and Lydia’s apartment on the south side, only the vaguest of images were getting through at all. I sort of remember Janelle picking us up in Dave’s big Cadillac convertible, putting the luggage in the trunk, sliding into the back seat next to my Liz Taylor blind date, her name was Sue Ellen, a lot of drumstick for me, but it didn’t matter because there was more vodka to share on the road out of Memphis, past the wrought iron Elvis gates of Graceland, into the Delta and oblivion.

I remember Highway 61, we had driven it so many mornings in search of white people to buy our books. Dave would turn to me and say, “Do you see the river over there?” I would look out the window at the cotton and the soybeans, a low green expanse stretching to the tree line off in the distance. “All of that belongs to my daddy, the son of a bitch.”

There’s a nasty end to this story, the scene that breaks through the blackout, it’s funny how that works. It’s all still fragments, the party in the Tara mansion, the big bedroom where Dave shoved me and Sue Ellen, what happened there, and what didn’t, the ride home to my house, the failed end of the vodka, the luggage on the porch, Dave dragging me past the morning glories to the door, pushing the bell before he drove away, the two women, the blonde and the brunette, sailing off into the Memphis night.

Mama stood on the crickets in her silky pink nightie. There was lace at the neck and a ridge of flesh bunched up on her forehead, a map of dismay and disapproval.

“Oh my God,” she gasped, and pushed open the Valentine door. I staggered back, looking up. “Hi Mom,” I shouted, falling towards her.

She tried to catch me, but I stuck out my right arm to break the fall. It was a slow motion ballet, an exhausted finale, a complete gesture that would elevate this story into the realm of family legend for years to come: the night of Nicky’s first blackout, the night he threw up all over his mama. Dad would tell it, his stage laugh booming, his voice betraying a hint of pride as mama pursed her lips, every single time.

“Hell, he was just a kid,” he said, “Trying to be a man.”