it, you pussy.”
I took the pill and washed it down with a healthy dose of malt liquor. He popped his dry with the flat of his palm.
“So,” I said, wiping something wet off my chin, “what else did you bring me back here for?”
He finished another swallow. “I just wanted to tell you that you looked good out there tonight. You haven’t lost it, man, you belong on a sales floor. That guy in the red jacket, I saw you step him into that Mitsubishi, that was clean.”
“He stepped himself.”
“That’s the point. You saw where he was going, you kept your mouth shut and let him roll right into it.” He paused. “Most of the good ones are dead or selling mattresses, Nick. There aren’t many left like you or me.” He winked and tapped my can with his.
“Is this ‘ The Closing of the Sales Frontier’ speech?” I asked.
“I’m just telling you that you need to be back on the floor.”
“I don’t think that’s what I need.”
“You’ll be back,” he said smugly. I could only hope that for once the silly bastard would be wrong.
OUR SMALL EVENING RUSH came and went without major incident. We did walk most of our customers, however, as our pitches and counter-objections increasingly consisted of alcohol logic.
At one point McGinnes nudged me and walked up to the backs of a man and, judging from her magnificent, showcase ass, his extremely attractive companion.
“Fuck your wife for you today, sir?” McGinnes asked cheerfully, running the words together rapidly as if they were one.
“No thanks,” the man said, turning and smiling. “We’re just looking around.”
I had hoped that McGinnes would someday be caught in the act of this, his oldest and stupidest trick. It was his contention that people never listened to the salesman’s opening line, so anything could be said, so long as it had the proper speed and inflection. Often he’d pinch the cheek of a toddler and say to his proud parents, “Cute little cocksucker!” or wipe his brow on a summer day and to sympathetic customers tiredly proclaim, “Sure is cock today.” And always get away with it.
By eight o’clock the down had kicked in and brought to the forefront all the alcohol that had preceded it. McGinnes, who had begun bumping into displays and cackling at me from across the showroom, had fallen off what was for him a very wide ledge. It was plain now that both of us were on a violently twisted binge.
When it became obvious that a Japanese-American woman who had wandered in was not going to buy, McGinnes began substituting the r’s in his words with l’s, and the outraged woman, who probably had more class in her pinky finger than he had in his entirely moronic body, walked out in disbelief. We’d get a letter on that one in the office, and she’d get an apology, most likely from Louie.
A little later, an elderly woman came in and asked for McGinnes. I broke away from Lee up front and found him in the basement. He was walking down a row of stock, jamming his forefinger through the cardboard cartons with a scream, before stepping up to the next box and repeating the act. There was blood on the tip of his finger.
I left him in the basement and returned to the floor to help the woman. The false confidence gained from eyedrops and mints had equalized me, and I was doing quite well with her, explaining the features and benefits of a blender as if they were earth-shattering.
I was doing well, until I looked over her shoulder. Sporting an utterly absurd smile, McGinnes stood casually behind her, one arm leaning on the display rack, one foot crossed over the other like some cologne cowboy against a split-rail fence. His freckled dick drooped lazily out of his unzipped fly.
In the course of a few seconds, as she turned around to see what I was smirking at, the zipped-up McGinnes stepped forward to greet her. She walked out ten minutes later, receipt and blender in hand.
McGinnes followed me to the Sound Explosion and tried to slap me five. I pulled my hand away.
“There’s no way I’m going back on that floor with you tonight.”
“Easy, Jim,” he said and pointed to the front door. A skinny man in an L.L. Bean costume and his very plain, pregnant wife entered the store and approached the counter. He said something to Lee, she handed him the ice bucket, he nodded curtly,