The Job (4 page)

No doubt about it, the sales game can have a nasty impact on your health, unless you work out a strategy for coping with its burdens. Like playing tennis twice a week. And maintaining a low-fat, low-sodium diet. And never drinking during lunch (unless, of course, you’re with one of several clients who will only throw six figures’ worth of business your way if you get smashed with them. And learning how to shrug off stress-that “convert-it-into-positive-energy you always read about in assorted “business management books… which essentially means landing a new deal whenever you’re feeling excessively anxious.

In fact, I had most of the “excesses” in my life under control-with one big exception: I’d yet to figure out how to stop spending excessive amounts of money.

The bathroom attendant pulled out a little wooden box from beneath the sink. Sliding it next to me, he stepped on top and began to de-lint my pinstriped shoulders with a brush.

“Nice suit, sir,” he said.

It certainly should be-considering that it’s a $1,200 Cerutti. If you peeked into my closet, you’d assume that suits are a weakness of mine. I own close to a dozen-and they’re all designer. I also buy top-of-the-line English shoes and the usual expensive accessories. But I’m not a style junkie, or the sort of go-getting executive who actually believes that an expensive suit turns you into a corporate warrior. To me, looking sharp is simply an intrinsic part of the sales game. It always gives you an edge with a client, and also gets you noticed by the senior management guys. But it’s nothing more than that. I meet guys all the time who bragged about their accoutrements-pulling back their French cuffs to reveal their $5,000 Ro-lexes, or boring me about how they knew they had arrived on the day they bought themselves a Porsche 911. I act dutifully impressed, but secretly think: Winners aren’t measured by their five-grand watches. Winners are measured by just one thing: their ability to close.

I handed the attendant ten bucks-a hefty tip, I know… but can you imagine working a toilet? I’ve always felt guilty about anyone who’s been reduced to a menial position. Maybe that’s because, deep down, I’ve always feared such lowly status-having spent two summers during college working at a fast-food joint; a brain-dead job in which I spent the day reiterating the question You want fries with the shake?

The attendant blinked with shock when he saw the ten bucks. Then, slipping it into his breast pocket, he said, “You have a real good night, sir.”

I moved on to the bar. It was all black marble and large silver mirrors, with a long, curved, zinc counter and opulent deco chairs. The mare was narkerl -with suits-mostly men in their thirties and forties, members of the deal-making executive class, all immaculately groomed, poking the air with their cigars to make their points.

I found a quiet corner table and had just ordered a martini straight up when my phone rang. I answered it quickly.

“It’s me.” I could barely make out Lizzie’s voice over the line’s static.

“You on your way?” I asked, glancing at my watch and noticing that she was late.

“Still stuck in a meeting at the Royalton.”

“Who are you with?”

“A prospective client. Miller, Beadle, and Smart. Midsize Wall Street brokerage house, trying to raise their profile.”

“Sounds fun.”

“If you like dealing with aging preppies.”

“Want me to walk down and meet you there? It’s, what… only ten blocks.”

“That’s okay-I should have things wrapped up here in half an hour. And then …”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I have big news,” she said in a mock-dramatic voice.

“How big?” I said, playing along.

“Earth-shatteringly big. Stop-the-presses big.”

“The suspense is killing me.”

She paused for effect.

“I managed to get us a table at Patroon.”

“Isn’t that the place I read about in New York last week?”

“No, that’s the place I told you you should read about in New York..

..”

“Some kind of hash house, right? With great cheeseburgers?”

“

“The new favorite watering hole of Manhattan’s power brokers,” if you believe everything you read.”

“I never believe anything I read in New York. But Geena does. Was this her idea?”

You score an A for perceptiveness. Of course, according to Geena, Ian’s also been dying to eat there, too.”

Geena worked with Lizzie at Mosman & Keating, a midsize Public relations firm. Her husband, Ian, wrote an “Around Town” column for the Daily News. They were also members of the New

York fast lane-and, much to our mutual amusement, liked to flash their glitzy credentials whenever possible.

“They’re joining us at Patroon after dropping in at a gallery opening in SoHo of some fabulous show by this fabulous Aboriginal finger painter…”

“And I bet the gallery’s going to be full of fabulous people. Lou Reed’s going to be there, right?”

“Sure. Along with Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. And Gore Vidal might drop in.”

“Not to mention John F. Kennedy, Jr….”

“Sharon Stone …”

“And that old standby, the fabulous Dalai Lama.”

We laughed.

“Anyway, Geena is in awe,” Lizzie said.

“Because Patroon ostensibly has a five-week waiting list for a table… which I just managed to circumvent thirty minutes ago.”

“Dare I ask how?”

“I’m the cleverest PR woman in New York, that’s how.”

“Can’t disagree with that.”

“Listen, I’ve got to fly back into this meeting. Patroon is one-sixty East Forty-sixth. The table’s reserved for nine-fifteen. Bye.”

And she was gone.

Leave it to Lizzie to snag a table for four at the hottest restaurant in town. Then again, if Lizzie puts her mind to something, she inevitably achieves results. Because, like me, she is the sort of person for whom results mean everything.

She, too, is a hick from the sticks. Ever heard of the town of Utica, New York? Smack dab in the middle of the snowbelt. The sort of place where there’s a virtual whiteout six months a year, and where the best civic amenity is the road out of town. Her dad was a sergeant on the local police force, a depressive prone to pitch-black moods that he drowned with cheap Utica Club beer. Her mom was the sort of Suzy Homemaker type who always had a smile on her face as she busied herself with a thousand and one domestic details, yet also chased Valium with Bailey’s Irish Cream.

“We weren’t exactly the happiest of families,” she confessed shortly after we met.

“Once I hit seventeen, all I could think about was eettine the hell out of Dodge.”

I certainly understood such sentiments-I hadn’t been back home once since leaving Brunswick in the fall of ‘87. Not that there was any home to go back to. By then my dad was newly dead, my mom had remarried a golf pro and moved to Arizona, and my older brother Rob had lost his heart to a Filipina bar girl named Mamie while stationed with the navy at Subic Bay.

We weren’t exactly the happiest of families. No-that really wasn’t us. We were the sort of folks who seemed reasonably content, never acknowledging any difficulties on the home front My dad was a military lifer-a guy from Indianapolis who saw the navy as his way out of the landlocked Midwest. He enlisted at the age of eighteen-and until his death twenty-nine years later, the navy was his Great White Father, who provided him with direction and dealt with all his essential necessities. Having been something of a screw up in high school (as he was fond of telling us), he got “discipline” and “focus” and “pride” from the navy. He rose quickly to ensign, then spent four years in training as a mechanical engineer. Two years into his Uncle Sam-backed studies at San Jose State, he met my mom (she was an English major)-so, as he was also fond of telling us, the navy found him a wife as well. They were married a week after graduating in 1962. Rob arrived the next summer; I showed up in January of ‘65. Our childhood was a string of tract houses in assorted naval air stations around the country: San Diego, Key West, Pensacola, and finally eleven years in Brunswick, Maine, where my dad was in charge of maintenance for “airborne operations.” It turned out to be his last posting. He died on January 2, 1987. He was only forty-seven, a victim of a lifelong attachment to cigarettes.

Just as I can’t picture my father without a Winston gripped between his teeth, I can never recall my parents fighting with each other. You see, my dad really bought into the idea of living a “shipshape” life.

“You play the game well, and the game will always treat you well”-another of his pet expressions, and one that summed up his belief that the team player, the good guy, was always rewarded for his loyalty and service. But besides being a good officer, he also worked hard at being a good father and provider. Of course, from the time I hit my teens I began to sense that there was a certain going-throuph-the-motions” qualitv to my narenlV marriaap-that my mom wasn’t exactly thrilled with her permanent housewife status, that she found base life confining, and that she and my dad had possibly fallen out of love with each other years ago. But my old man’s “code of duty” meant that the family had to be held together. It also meant that he could never show favoritism toward any one son… though it was pretty clear to me that Rob was his golden boy, not only because he followed my dad into the navy right after leaving high school, but also because, unlike me, he didn’t seem to be dreaming of a world far removed from the Kmart realities of naval-base life.

When I was sixteen, my dad came into my room one night and found me reading Esquire in bed.

“You want Playboy I’ll get it for you at the PX,” he said.

“But, Esquire… Christ, it’s nothing but fancy-assed writing and fancy-assed suits.”

Which, of course, is why I loved it. It represented the metropolitan world to which I aspired. I saw myself living the New York life, eating in those designer restaurants that Esquire featured, dressing in those $600 suits that adorned their fashion pages, talking the urban buzz talk that seemed second nature to their writers. Not because I craved these actual things-but because they struck me as essential components of true success.

Of course my dad knew this-just as he also knew that my mom encouraged me to have ambitions beyond Brunswick and the U.S. Navy.

“Take it from me,” she said when I was struggling through my college applications.

“There’s only one person in the whole wide world who will ever stop you from getting to where you want to be-and that’s yourself.”

And so, I aimed high and applied to Bowdoin, an elite liberal arts college located a mere mile down the road from the naval air station. Growing up in Brunswick, Bowdoin represented yet another select realm that I yearned to enter, but from which I was excluded.

“It’s the waiting list,” I said, showing my father the admissions letter from Bowdoin in the spring of 1983. He could hear the disappointment in my voice.

“It’s still not an acceptance, Dad. And according to Mr. Challenor…”

“Who’s this Mr. Challenor?”

“My college advisor. Anyway, he said I probably would’ve gotten in if I hadn’t needed financial aid.”

I instantly regretted my thoughtlessness. My father looked at me as if I’d inadvertently kneed him in the balls. Discipline… focus … pride-my dad’s credo. And without realizing it, I had punctured that complex, defensive dignity-and his sense of duty to his son.

“How much is a year at Bowdoin?” he asked quietly.

“It doesn’t matter, Dad.”

“How much?”

“With room and board, around seventeen….”

He emitted a low whistle and regarded the yellowing linoleum on our kitchen floor.

“That’s a hell of a chunk of change,” he finally said, lighting up a Winston.

“I know, Dad.”

“But the math doesn’t work, son. You understand that?”

“Of course I understand,” I lied.

“Like I said, it doesn’t matter.”

“That’s bullshit, son,” he said, his face suddenly a mask of defeat.

“It matters. You know it, I know it. It really matters.”

And that’s how I ended up at a very affordable, very second-rate branch of the University of Maine at Presque Isle-where I was just about the only student on campus not majoring in agricultural science. Of course, I hated being stuck in this nowhere town, surrounded by people doing graduate work on brucellosis (believe me, after Presque Isle, Brunswick seemed downright cosmopolitan). Whenever I saw my dad, however, I never let on just how much I loathed that hick university, or how I continued to rue the fact that lack of money had essentially barred me from Bowdoin … and the world it represented.

But he knew. Any time I was home for the weekend and Mom raised the question, “How’s school?” Dad would get that whipped look on his face and light another cigarette. In his mind, he had failed me-and his own convoluted sense of pride made it impossible for him to see that I didn’t think less of him because he was on a new man’s pay. So a painful distance-a stiff reserve-began to creep into our relationship. Even after he was diagnosed with lung cancer (at the end of my junior year), he dodged my attempts to get close to him again.

“The hell you crying about, son?” he demanded one night toward the end of his illness. When my tears subsided, I tried to sound an optimistic note. It rang hollow.

“Listen, when you get better-” He cut me off.

“Not gonna happen,” he said, his tone deliberately “right stuff.”

“So let’s not dwell on the inevitable, okay? Anyway, a couple of months from now, after you’ve graduated, you’re gonna be so far gone out of Maine, it’s not gonna matter if I’m alive or dead….”

“That’s not true….”

“I know you, Ned. I know what you want… and what you think you gotta prove. And for that reason I also know that, unlike me, the math is gonna work for you.”

He understood me better than I realized. Just as he also knew that the math defines us. Provides us with our sense of worth. Fuels our ambitions, Feeds our insecurities. Fucks us up. Forces us out of bed in the morning. Gives us a reason to fight our way through the day.

My martini arrived. I raised the glass, touched the frosty rim to my lips, and let the gin trickle down my throat. Just as it was numbing my vocal cords, my phone rang again.