Teacup Monkeys

Saturday was freedom day, payday, a reward for putting up with five consecutive days in school. It was my vacation day before spending all morning in church on Sunday.

Slamming down the receiver on our old black telephone, (Number Please? Ours was Westfield 2-2986J) as Donny Ferguson did the same thing in his house across the street... and with my one dollar allowance burning hot in the pocket of my corduroy pants, I ran out the back door. Letting the screen door slam hard behind me, I made a bee-line to the garage. It's wooden doors on the left stood open, a little drunk, but welcoming. The top hinge on the door was broken apart so the it leaned outward like a after hours bar evacuee holding onto a no parking sign.. Gripping my bike in a run, I jumped on like Roy onto Trigger. Peddling my feet into a blur, flying down my driveway, hair in the wind, I rode on a high of excitement and expectation.

Going way too fast to worry about cars when we hit the street, Donny Ferguson shot out of his opposing driveway at the exact same time as I did. Mirror images, peddling in tandem, leaning into a sharp arch, forming parallel lines down the center of Alden Avenue. A speeding frenzy of bony elbows over knees pumping speed into fat tires that sang a low humming duet with the hot asphalt. Each of us had a dollar in our pocket,  eager for familiar treasures at the Mountainside news stand. They had a huge assortment of candy bars, offered for consideration, neatly arranged on a tiered shelf just inside the front door. The whole display started at kid level and went up from there. Donny and I would stand pressed up against the base of the display, immersed in a sea of candy, all bright packaging and sweet smells. Weighing the possibilities... a “Hollywood” bar was big and heavy...but just OK, whereas a “Heath Bar” was small, but that toffee was full of almonds and hard to beat. We had ten chances to pick a perfect team. Candy was five cents, so 10 candy bars were half a dollar, that left enough for 5 of the ten cent comic books. Riding off like bank robbers on horseback, as quickly as we had swooped in, bounty in hand, we raced toward home, eager to get back to the hideout. Hidden safely on Donny's screen porch, ready to examine our loot.

We spent most Saturday afternoons on his screen porch immersed in Superman adventures pumped up on a sugar high.

Later in the afternoon, surrounded by empty candy wrappers and comforted by the fact that, as always, Superman was just...super, my attention turned to the ad on the inside back page of the comic book in hand.

That's where Cloverine Brand Salve had their full-page display ad. It stated that if you were 12 years old, the Cloverine Brand Salve Company would pay you in prizes or money to sell their product. Neither of us were 12 yet but all we had to do was to say that we were.  No problem. The ad said, “Kids! Get rich selling Cloverine Salve!” .I didn't really know just what Cloverine Brand Salve was or what it was used for, but their ads captivated me. They knew their market and offered young kids like me an opportunity to earn stuff if you sold their salve. They would pay kids a commission on sales or you could choose from a graduated list of prizes. The prizes included, Daisy air rifles, Radio Flier wagons, and even bicycles. But the big prize looked out at me from the inside of a teacup...take your choice of a real live dog... or a monkey. Both were small enough to fit inside that teacup and they both looked happy to pose. I just had to have that monkey, so I sent a letter to The Wilson Chemical Company, and ordered my first case of salve.

A heavy brown box arrived several weeks later, addressed to Moi. That was pretty special in itself. It made me feel powerful, like a real businessman, I was amazed that at my age I was able to write to these people and have them actually send me a case of salve just because I asked them to. The brown cardboard box had real weight to it, it was substantial. Proud of myself for making it happen and goiing into my own business, I felt a like a grown-up. Tearing open the top flaps of the box, I exposed neat rows, round tins of Cloverine Brand Salve. The label listed the ingredients as petroleum jelly, white wax, and oil of turpentine. It said: “Apply liberally when desired”. I had no clue what you would apply it liberally to though.

I hadn't thought of that. What's the stuff good for and is anyone going to buy it? So I asked around. One of the older boys in our very white, Presbyterian neighborhood, claimed that “colored people” use the salve to plaster their hair down. Now I didn't have any way of knowing if this was true or not but I was very aware that if it was, in my own neighborhood, there were no sales waiting for me behind door number, well my house was 530 Alden avenue so pick any number up to 20 higher or lower and you would pretty much have it covered. No go, in either direction as far as 7 minutes of continuous walking would take you. And so I caved. I wasn't going to make money selling Cloverine Brand Salve door to door after all. But I still had to pay the Wilson Chemical Company for all that salve...I wonder who would buy a WHOLE CASE? Who would be dumb enough or nice enough for that?

Mom! Mom! Are you here? I need to talk to you!

Yes, she bought it and had me carry it down to the basement while her own jury was out deciding just what to do with this particular case of salve.

So that was it. No monkey in a teacup for me, the dog and the monkey were in the list of top prizes that required the sales of lots of cases of salve, lots of them... But I did get to pick a prize, after all, I had sold an entire case of Cloverine Brand Salve and the Wilson Chemical Company was ready to express it's gratitude. They offered me a long list of lower tier special prizes to pick from. I don't really know why, but I picked a six foot velvet tapestry of Jesus at the Last Supper. It was shiny and looked like it was made to be displayed with a black light in a room full of incense but the popularity of that kind of thing was still a good ten to fifteen years in the future.

For two years, Jesus and his disciples adorned the wall of my bedroom , right next to my arrowhead collection and a “Visible Man” anatomical figure with it's clear plastic body and brightly colored internal organs...always facing Jesus and watching him eat his dinner.

I'd say I learned a lesson there, but having approached several multi-level marketing "opportunities" with a similar naive enthusiasm as an adult, perhaps it's true that we are who we are from a young age and for some of us, hope springs eternal.

And stupidity. Hope and stupidity.

When my parents sold that old house in 1965, the new buyers got the bonus of a moldy cardboard box, covered with spider webs and rot-glued to the cement floor, in a dark corner under the basement stairs.

Maybe they had curly hair and could actually use the stuff.

Teenager Scat

Teens litter the ground with their scat on a small wooded hillside in the park behind our house. Their droppings scattered with less concern for the location than my dogs show in their disdain for soiling our own backyard. But the area the kids hang out in is their own back yard, and their waste identifies them by age and gender. The broken tube of a Roman Candle peeks out from under a raised tree root, limp and flaccid, it's colors as faded as the passions which once sparked violent ejaculations of multicolored fire. An empty tin of chewing tobacco, a travel size deodorant stick, multiple crushed cans of energy drinks, cigarette packages.. A condom wrapper lies on the ground, hopefully the only thing torn and discarded in its use. I want to curse the the teens and condemn their lack of responsibility, but I know better. It's like cursing a goat for being a goat. I was a goat once. I dropped the very same scat in a different park a lifetime ago...Vienna sausages and all, and I had less concern for the location than my dogs show in their disdain for soiling our own backyard.

Jay Hughes

His high pitched, repetitive yelp still rings in my ears like a Mariachi band singer yelling at Saturday night itself. Riding his motorcycle locked in the arc of one impossibly long “wheelie” from the men's dorms to the main campus... that's how I remember Jay..an out-of-control crazy guy with a huge raised scar griping the back of one hand. Rumor was that it came from a shotgun blast through a hand that was doing it's best to seal the end of the barrel. But he could no more contain the shotgun blast than he could his own explosive energy. That shotgun blast... what a great story for a campus full of impressionable young people trying to figure out who they wanted to be when they grew up. I was one of them and to me, Jay Hughes represented an extreme end of a bell curve. He drew a line in the sand and dared everyone, anyone, to step over it and join him. I always liked that.

Random...

Special Services...Thanks To Brian...the Best Liar In The Business...

Years ago I worked in the “Special Services” division of an air courier company in Reston, Va. It was our job to speak with customers after my company had totally screwed up, or destroyed, their special shipment in some way. Kidneys intended for immediate transplant would end up in the wrong airports, rotting away long after the dry ice had melted. Our guys drove a forklift through the original artwork for the movie “Cocoon”. Jewelry disappeared; trucks drove over boxes packed with fragile glassware.

My boss, Brian, was considered to be the best professional liar in our industry. He blamed everything on whatever airline we used to ship the packages. Brian oozed empathy in whispered tones to irate customers... “unbelievable, just unbelievable that Delta Airlines could treat our packages with such disregard...it's disgusting!” This was the 1980's and Brian kept himself supercharged with frequent visits to the men's room where he would snort long lines off of the tank above the commode. He wore very dark glasses all the time and when asked about them, he claimed that he had just been to the eye doctor and had gotten eye drops. We asked about the glasses just to smile at his routine answer. But aside from sincere slime, Brian had special techniques for problem customers who kept on bitching and just wouldn't shut up.

One afternoon Brian was in the zone, taking “Special Services” complaint calls in the next room. These were the calls that everyone else was afraid to handle. Co-workers were in awe of Brian's ability to withstand day after day of threats and verbal abuse. He took it all in stride and saved his very special services for customers who refused to be talked down off of the ledge. A small group of us paused in our scurrying about to watch Brian hold court. He had a particularly nasty customer on the line and showed us just what to do when all else fails. Brian would take the handset from his phone and dangle it by the cord into a round metal trash can while spinning it in circles like a cowboy's lariat. The handset knocked the shit out of the inside of the trash can and made horrible, explosive noises. Periodically he would lift the phone and whisper to the customer “Boy, that storm is terrible! Do you hear that? Just terrible!” Then he would take the phone and turn a little volume dial on the handle up as high as it would go and hold the handset down on his Formica desktop. The sound would “loop” into a high-pitched scream like some woman being stabbed to death on a dark city street. Again, Brian would lift the phone to his lips, “terrible, just terrible”. That particular afternoon the Vice President of the company was in town and was passing by as Brian dripped his poisoned honey into a customer's ear. With a big smile, he gave Brian a hurried “thumbs-up” and an approving nod for his obvious sincerity as he whispered sympathetically to his customer.

I almost wet my pants I was laughing so hard.

After Brian left the company, moving on to other things, I was promoted to the head of the Special Services department. Like Brian, I loved getting the tough calls and took pride in being able to handle anything. Mostly people just wanted to vent, and I was a good listener, always doing what I could to help make a bad situation better. No metal trash can or looping phones, but I did still blame everything on the airlines themselves.

Two years later I was filled with pride and knew that I had reached the pinnacle of my career with Special Services when the big gun, our top salesman from the New York City division announced to the owner and the president of the company: “Hugh Haller is the best liar in the business!”

Thanks Brian, to be the best you've got to learn from the best.