Notebooks part 11 by Ron Steinman

• Posted by Roger on October 17, 2008
• 46 comments

My thoughts on being a pitchman. I work in front of people.  I know nothing about them. But I now know exactly what they are and what they are not. Generally they smell badly, as if they can’t afford deodorant. Could it be the weather? They are like leeches. They mooch every chance they get. The people are poor in this neighborhood. People run to me when they hear me call: Come over, come on over here. I have something for everyone. I want them steered here, to me, to my counter. They come as if I’m a magnet. The show attracts them to me and they believe they’ll get something free. When they get something free, they pay nothing for anything extra. The people are thick, with minds that don’t move fast. Usually they make me sick. I throw the poor bastards a bone and then they fall asleep in front of me. I know that’ll never do. I don’t know how to wake them without doing something foolish to make me appear stupid. Then again, maybe I just toss a lousy spiel.

All is aberrant.
So is this damn job.

I now work the McCrory’s store in Newark. Suddenly I can’t escape New Jersey. I spend my first 21 years in Brooklyn and manage to be in Jersey three, four times. I graduate college with high distinction in history and get my first job in Joisey. Is there a message here? Maybe my luck will change. I’m averaging 70 bucks a week, hardly a living. That’s too low. Six pitches a day are all I can manage. I can’t get the crowds to stay once I charm them. I have to do at least ten pitches a day to make a c-note a week. The outfit I’m working for is making a fortune off me and all the other suckers they have working for them

At night when I return to my parent’s home in Brooklyn, I’m getting into the habit of having a drink in the neighborhood joint on the corner a half block from my house. It is a place where “nice” Jewish boys don’t go, especially when they live down the street. I consider myself lucky for having this goy bar to visit. Tonight I saw a man crying, truly crying in his beer. I thought that only happened in the movies or in bad books. See how wrong I can be. I wonder what it is that causes a man to cry, and at times, if not to weep, at least arrive at the point where he wants to weep. I’ll take it a step further. If he doesn’t want to cry but he suddenly finds that he is going to cry, that he must cry to wash his soul of some damage, what does he do to fight himself and not cry? He knows from his upbringing that he must never cry, at least when he’s in front of others. Without doubt he struggles to make sense of an emotion he can’t control. I think that’s a man problem, a problem for men in our backward society. “Boys don’t cry!” I heard that all my life. Still, hear it. “Boys don’t cry!” Hurt or not, inside or out, boys don’t cry. Men cannot cry, should not cry, especially in public, because society doesn’t allow them to cry. It is the one public defense a man cannot use, unless, of course, he is drunk like that man down at the other end of the bar.

July 15, 1955, 10:45 p.m. Soon I hope to be making it, anything, again.

Man, it’s hot. Heat is funny. It makes me want to do nothing, but it makes me erotic as hell. It’s crazy and paralyzing. The hot weather gives me an erection when I sit and write. Wrote Leslie again. Still no answer.
I have to do more reading. All this work is getting in the way of my head. So much is on my mind. Money, future, women, money, future, women. I’m still waiting for a reply from NYU. I hope there’s no trouble. Hope everything works out, but if it doesn’t, well then I can’t allow it to bother me. I’ll be 21 in a few days. Too damn few days. Radio on. The music is great. Balcony Rock. Take Five. Brubeck. Shearing. Too much ale. Birdland Show, Lullaby of—one, two, three, testing.  Soon more money. Buy sandals for tired, hot feet.

Brooklyn, July 16, 1955. So agreeable, so new, so fresh, so clean, so blue: Am I? Sigh.

Two years for graduate school and my masters degree. But I have no money. Sailors, whores, college men (bright ones). I don’t care. Who cares?

July 20, 1955. I wrote Carole a day after my twenty-first birthday.

I have to get more bristles and more lanolin. I’m always running behind what I earn and what I pay for supplies. At this rate I’ll owe them more than I earn. I must aim for the boardwalk in Atlantic City. It’s the least they can do for me after all my failures.
Graduate school seems almost certain now. I have to work up a program that will carry me through over the next two years. I’ll go for my masters at night and work during the day. It should work out okay. Father to his son, “Here comes my son the student.” Finally, someone will be happy.

The goods arrived at the store. I now have combs and brushes and lanolin and shampoo. I’ve so much of the god damned stuff, I don’t know what to do with it. I’m not selling enough to make any money so I can’t consider myself a successful pitchman. Can I arrange to have someone in the store steal this crap? Who will be dumb enough to buy it even on the street?

There is so much to do, to see, to hear. There are so many ways to live life, to have action. Does action by itself necessarily denote ant-intellectualism? Man, I hope not. I wish it were easy for me to say, definitely not. Action for a Hindu is much different from action for a Jew, than in the pure sense for a Hebrew. Take that for granted. Action means movement, but movement toward what? Toward learning? Toward sex? Toward arriving at self-satisfaction? Toward knocking at the door of anything physical? Toward existentialism? Toward an intellectual activism of the mind. The mind leaps forward and bounds toward answers that can’t be found by searching within. Sitting. Standing. Prostrate. All happen simultaneously with a flick of the mind’s wrist. Don’t ruin it by lowering it to the depths of ocean slime and muck. Is it a game of semantics? Is it a game of philology? No doubt, a game. No matter what anyone says. No matter what.

Do I love her? Hey, I wonder. That’s the problem confronting me. I’ll either figure it out by hard thought (different from soft thought), or it’ll come to me in a religious flash. Should I trust it if it comes? Her letter will tell me much. Leslie still hasn’t answered but what she writes seems to matter less each moment. I must discover where her mind is these days. I assume she has some curiosity about me, life, us. Does she have a passion to learn? Is there anything she wishes to discuss, to read? Does she want to get in a car and drive someplace for adventure? I don’t think I’m asking too much when I express my urge to know. I know I must wait for her answer. If the signals are right, there should be one coming soon. Signals, right? My imagination is at work. A few more days. A few more drinks. Now to sit back, sweat it and wait.

July 28, 1955. It has become a big day. Carole answered and now I’ve written her another letter. I have no choice but to wait for her answer. If it hits me the way I think it will I’ll ask her to come to New York. This is not as silly as it sounds. It’s not senseless to make plans. Plans put me in a good frame of mind. Though I do plan for events in my life, I rarely make plans that succeed. I may end breaking earlier plans I made or I may act on the spur of the moment, but what the hell. Dave may be right, but I think it’s she I’ve always loved. I’ve been away from Carole for too long and I really would like to hear from her. I would like to see her soon. Carole’s answer to my latest letter remains my most important priority. Her letter must answer my letter and not screw around with what I wrote. Otherwise, we will continue the mess we are in. And she must realize many things about me she refused to see in the past. Our possible impending situation needs a resolution.

I spoke to my boss tonight. He says, with a sigh of resignation, I can have part of Atlantic City for a few weeks. Perfect. Perhaps I can right myself and get out of debt. I’d also like to prove I can do this job, though I realize it has no future. I’ll delay telling NYU my decision until I finish the boardwalk stint. With partial expenses, sun, sand and surf, available chicks and kosher franks, maybe even I can make some bucks and come out ahead. Goodbye Bamberger’s in Newark and hello Mrs. Court’s Rooming House By The Sea.

I haven’t been reading much lately. Carole is too much on my mind. She consumes all my thoughts. And there is the matter of making a living, another consuming passion. This would be a good time to get started again, especially with graduate school staring me in the face. Take at least ten books with me to Atlantic City. Include works on religion. Read about Buddhism, Taoism and Judaism. If anyone asked me why, I would have to say I really don’t know, but with those three religions, I believe there is common ground.

“Why is there any being at all and not rather nothing?” Martin Heidegger.

“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.”  Ulysses, James Joyce.

“No one need make a spiritual detour to ascertain that he exists.”
The Tale of The Wig, Pio Baroja.

“Brutishness,” I suggested.

“Yes . . . All my brutishness, but he can scarcely read or write.”

“And he has never philosophized on life,” I added.

“No,” Wolf Larsen answered, with an indescribable air of sadness.
“And he is all the happier for leaving life alone. He is too busy living it to think about it. My mistake was in ever opening the books.” The Sea Wolf, Jack London.

“The warbler, swinging
his body upside down
does his first singing.”
A haiku attributed to Kikaku (1661-1707)

Atlantic City, New Jersey. August 7, 1955. These are my impressions of Atlantic City while trying to work a pitch, working a pitch, surviving a pitch.

Dirt from the old wood boardwalk always covers my ankles. Sand fills the crevices between my toes. My sandals quickly become scuffed-raw and grease-stained. But they are comfortable. The rest of me is surprisingly clean, my clothing neat and pressed, smells good. All of me is a mixture of salt and taffy and coarse Jewish mustard, the tastiest in the world.

Before starting my pitch I always sniff the clean ocean air. I love the smell of salt borne on the wind. I cough the fine dust and sand that blanket everything only a few feet off the ocean. When I cough, I hawk and spit brown-stained cigarette saliva from the unfiltered Camel’s I smoke. Then I get down to work.

It doesn’t matter what I sell. My job is to reel in the crowd. Wayne’s syrupy product is always the same richly perfumed, lanolin based, whitish orange colored liquid with less than ten-percent alcohol. I’m positive he bottles it in his spare room. It cost the customer one dollar a bottle and if he buys the shampoo, he also receives a free comb and brush, what we call the teeth and bristle. The free comb and brush are the come-ons. It is that give-a-way that turns the audience on or keeps them away.