I can still see Jay trying to sell this young Navy wife a Bible, while she kept telling him she was agnostic. I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or butt in and set him straight.

I kept quiet. When you’re tagging along with another direct salesman and he’s into his pitch, it’s more or less gospel to keep your mouth shut, other than a “hi” to the prospect or a few brief and innocuous comments. Because if you start talking, the customer may feel he’s being ganged up on, getting it from both sides. Then, too, the pitch is a show, a standup, and timing is everything. To talk over the rhythm of the pitch would be to break the timing of the pitchman. When I was a kid in the book biz back in New York, I knew a couple of young aspiring actors rappin’ slats — selling books door-to-door — until they got their shot on Broadway. I guess it was a kind of training to them, summer stock before hitting the big time.

Jay was doing a laydown in the Chula Vista apartment of this newlywed Navy couple. It was maybe 20 years ago. The place was one of those furnished jobs that proliferated in the South Bay for the service families that would likely be there only a short time. A “laydown” is another word for a pitch, or presentation. You lay down large broadsides, plasticized papers flaunting a blaze of books that looked like fancy pastries, comelier as graphics than the drabber reality. One after the other they’re drawn from the sales kit, dazzling the prospect with the idea that he’s getting all these extras as some kind of “bonus.”

Jay specialized in young service families. So did I, to a slightly lesser extent. So did a lot of local peddlers, like the photo-album salesmen and the whole-life insurance boys. Everyone was nursing on the big military tit. This market was young and relatively naïve. Sailors had regular employment and likely would have for at least a few years, and more often than not the parents were far away and so were not around to warn the kids about the evil, lying peddlers. Or, those “snakes in the grass,” as the mother of a newlywed I once sold described me in an angry call to the company that employed me.

It was embarrassing to sit in that living room and watch Jay make a jerk of himself. The guy was a hard worker and probably the most productive book salesman in San Diego at the time, which was the mid- to late ’70s, early ’80s. This one, though, I knew he wasn’t going to close.

He had laid the Bible broadside on the floor. In tune with peddler practice going back generations, his technique was to get the prospect to make little affirmative decisions, to participate in the pitch, so that the big decision, the final “yes,” would be easy, would continue the good feelings, the natural flow. Dozens, maybe hundreds of tomes have been penned by sales experts expounding upon this technique.

“It comes in either the Catholic or King James version,” Jay airily intoned, then waited a few seconds and pointed at the couple on the couch before him. “King James?” he asked smiling. Get the idea? Get them to make an easy choice. It’s a subliminal commitment, as the sales textbooks would have it.

“Agnostic,” the young wife replied, matter-of-fact. I could see in Jay’s face that he had never heard of this religion, but he wasn’t going to let that inconsequential item break up his pitch.

He kind of waved his hand at her, smiling like a fool. “King James?” She looked at him like, oh boy, here’s a guy selling encyclopedias and dictionaries and he doesn’t have a clue. “Agnostic,” she repeated, very quietly.

I started to wonder if she was double-meaning the word, telling him she was agnostic about the pitch. But she was only 19 or so, as was her husband, who sat there like a piece of furniture. I was counting the minutes before we could get the hell out.

Jay, though, tried one more time with his “King James” mantra, a little more forcefully, more flutter of the hand, trying to squeeze out a positive reply. No answer. Young Wife was silent now, withdrawn. Her husband followed her lead. Jay plugged on, sensing something amiss, but telling his tale until the stillborn deal ground him down and he packed his broadsides back into his kit. Outside, he laughed long and loud when I explained it to him.

After spending the better part of a lifetime selling encyclopedias and other items door-to-door or by appointment, I may have only war stories like this to show for it. Yeah, I made good money, at times. When I was 21, I was earning more than many people twice my age, driving a new car, partying every night, having a blast. Not bad, I thought, for a high school dropout. But the money probably is never the paramount thing for most direct, self-employed salesmen. The quick money, though, was a big item, the ability to earn more in a day than those in the workaday world made in a week. Since many commission salesmen were always, as Simon and Garfunkel sang, “one step ahead of the shoe shine, two steps away from the county line” and the bill collector and tax man as well, the fast-buck skills were essential.

But it was also the lifestyle, the independence, the free-as-a-bird feeling, the idea that you could go anywhere in the country or anywhere abroad where Americans lived and with your sales kit be making money from the first day you hit town. Heady stuff for a young, footloose guy who’d been shackled to a time clock. Most of us could have worked very successfully for some big corporation because we were, as they say, “self-starters,” self-rolling wheels who didn’t need a kick in the ass to get to work and who had the balls to do what the soft corporate kind didn’t. But our personalities were such that we couldn’t fit the corporate pigeonholes, couldn’t abide the petty rules and politics that go with it. And since we could work without the safety net of a guaranteed salary, we didn’t have to abide the corporate bullshit. There was a certain pride in this, that we could live on our own terms and just about anywhere we wanted, by our wits and our ability to command center stage in a stranger’s home, to make the pitch that brought the bucks. A knock on the door, and an hour later you’re walking out with a contract for maybe $500 worth of books, which most buyers of same would probably never use.

We called ourselves bookmen. Companies seeking encyclopedia salesmen would make “Bookman” the heading in their classified help-wanted ads. Sometimes we’d refer to ourselves as cyke peddlers, and to others we knew — or sometimes, to ourselves — as book bums. But we were all, generically, slat-rappers, door-pounders, at least when we first were getting started, before learning smarter and more effective ways to reach the prospect.

We didn’t, though, call ourselves bookmen with females we were trying to impress. You found out fast that describing yourself as a self-employed commission salesman rang no bells with the ladies and their latent but powerful nesting instincts, even with your bright new car parked outside the singles bar. We told them we were junior executives for a major publishing company.

We did feel we possessed more courage than the clock-punching bozos who traded freedom for a sure-thing paycheck. I knew a young manager back in New York who used to holler at the new recruits brought in by the blind want ads that he was looking for guys “with big brass balls.” Even so, our courage had parameters, else we would have traded our sales kits for Smith & Wessons and robbed banks. In fact, the young manager, who resembled Frank Sinatra in style and profile and who drove a new Jaguar usually decorated with a beautiful girl, later did get a gun and rob a liquor store. And got caught. But we all kind of respected him. He’d proved he had the brass balls he so admired.

When a salesman turns to crime, it’s almost always of a less violent kind. I’ve heard of peddlers, once inside the house, picking up items of value when the customer’s attention was diverted. Others, I understand, used their sales presentation to get inside a home, cased it, and returned later to burglarize it, or passed the information on to a thieving friend. Five years or so into the business, I was making a pitch in a mobile home when the phone rang. I heard my prospect assure the caller I was OK, that I was legitimate. It seemed that two nights before, some guy posing as an encyclopedia salesman (or, shit, maybe he really was one) had talked his way inside a door and raped a woman. And the caller had seen me knocking on doors. I was lucky I wasn’t detained on suspicion; instead, I walked away with an order.

Speaking of trailer parks, these were the places to go to get lucky in ways other than sales deals. I was once out with a crew, a bunch of young salesmen working a large mobile-home complex in a rural area, when one of the guys came running after me. “Party going on two streets over,” he shouted. He’d stumbled upon three young ladies bored with country living who were nice enough to invite us all in. We stayed the night, getting drunk and laid. And went to work as usual the next day. The other young bookmen and I would sometimes spend all night out messing around in New York City, or playing poker, and then go to work the next day without sleep. Recovery times are fast two decades into life.

Another time I was working a trailer park in tandem with a friend, married but always on the lookout to break the nuptial vows, his own and others’. This young woman with a four-month-old baby told us her husband was asleep in the bedroom. Then she leaned over, real slow like, to display each millimeter of her bursting bust. “He’s got to go to work in a few hours, but come back tonight.” She said she was interested and wanted to know more. My friend and I flipped a coin as to who would go back. He won. She couldn’t get enough, he reported, but wouldn’t stop talking about what a bastard her husband was. I visited the next night and she didn’t seem surprised to see me, not asking where my friend was but still ripping into her mate. Between the sheets she got me to promise I’d get her a free set. She said she escaped her clod of a spouse by retreating into books. (And evidently also into casual sex with passing salesmen.) The company did sometimes sell salesmen repossessed sets, but they still were fairly expensive. Guilt rode on my ass for a while, and I later sent her a six-volume set of children’s storybooks, which is more than my friend did. The whole thing was depressing, failings of the flesh. You have to be “up” to perform — I mean as a salesman. On occasion through the years I’ve been gnawed by the dark hound of depression, a dangerous beast to a self-employed door-pounder often but one sale away from life on the street.

I knew a bookman who sold a set to a divorcée with a ten-year-old child. He dated her, and they got married soon after. “Now I’m paying for the damn books,” he’d laugh. It’s not that rare an occurrence. Some women are attracted to salesmen, but not necessarily because they’re fast-talking and full of soothing lies. Socializing is part of the job, and listening to people — even more than talking — is essential. A good peddler is not the Charlie Loudmouth some may think but more an instant friend with psychotherapeutic skills.

Of course, you can never lose sight of the objective. Once, in the Midwest, I was surprised for a short second when the young marrieds told me they would have to pray over the decision. I told them fine, thinking they would adjourn to an adjoining room. But they sank to their knees and asked me to join them in prayer. I thought this would last maybe 10 or 20 seconds, you know, like those perfunctory “graces” you hear at the dinner table of certain friends, but I felt I was kneeling there forever. I blinked open an eye to see what was happening, and they were still praying away. I instinctively felt that if God was taking this long to answer, He might need some help. I spoke up, softly but with enthusiasm. “Oh, yes. It would be a fine program for this couple and for their future children. Amen.” Their prayer had apparently been answered in the same way, because I wrote the order.

It’s not completely correct to say that the empathy displayed by the salesman is fake. It’s real at the time, although perhaps “real” in the same way that a professional actor feels he is the character he’s portraying. I’ve listened to personal problems more than a few times, even when I knew I wasn’t going to close the order. And I’ve offered sympathetic counsel. Once, a broke young couple told me they were going to send money to one of those “work-at-home” rackets. I talked them out of it and also declined to sell them any books, because they obviously couldn’t afford it. OK, I also knew they’d never pass muster with the credit department.

I knocked around the Midwest for a while, rollin’ from city to city, town to town, rappin’ slats, movin’ product, havin’ fun. In Cleveland I went out with a girl I met when selling cykes to her sister and brother-in-law. After our first date, I told her I had to go on the road for a while, company business. I didn’t want to get serious with her until I’d gotten paid on her sister’s order: people presume too much when things get personal. Four months later I was back in Cleveland, living with her. She wanted me to stay, permanently, in that crummy burg, so I had to lie that the company needed me in the field to train new salesmen. For the couple of years the romance lasted, I had a place to stay whenever I hit Cleveland, until she realized that the saw about rolling stones and moss was true. Still, the salesman/farmer’s daughter stories are exaggerated, I think. When you’re out in the field, you have to keep your mind on work or there’ll be no payday. I’ve passed up obvious invitations because I needed the money more than a glandular explosion. And so, I know, have other salesmen, probably since the sales game began. Because if you don’t stay focused, you won’t be working on commission for long. “Don’t shit where you eat” was the way one slat-rapper put it.

I took this crude advice years later when pitching a newlywed pair in Clairemont. I was receiving all the positive responses as I proceeded through my presentation but did take note of certain gratuitous comments from the husband to the effect that his wife had a great body and liked sex. It wasn’t quite as open as that, but almost. They were seated on the sofa, facing me, as you always like to position the prospects. Midway through the pitch the attractive young bride’s legs began to open, slowly, like one of those creaking drawbridges on the East Coast.

Frankly, sex was the last thing on my mind. I was sniffing money, not the scent of a sexually aroused female. I had a deal going, and if I screwed the bride, that would surely screw the deal. They’d maybe want the books for free, really free, like the lady in the trailer park. And nothing is really free. Likely her husband would also have wanted to watch, and I’m too old-school for that. Like a rube from the sticks, I feigned ignorance of the salacious invitations and closed the deal. Driving to the post office to mail the order, I figured that if it kicked out — canceled — I’d call and try to date the wife, to at least get something for my time and effort. But it held up. I guess they, too, wanted the deal more than the sex.

There are no door-to-door bookmen anymore, not even any selling by appointment, because the print-encyclopedia game right now is just about where the buggy-whip industry was a century ago. Sure, there are still sundry peddlers (they prefer to call themselves “representatives”) who sell in-home, like insurance salesmen and the construction add-on people, and maybe even a few selling hard goods. Most of these work by appointment. It’s all telemarketing now, or those camouflaged pyramid schemes known as multilevel marketing. The only true slat-rappers left are the Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness canvassers, selling their own brand of belief.

I can recall when there were around 15 English-language print sets marketed. Now, I understand, there are just three updated and published each year (Americana, World Book, and Book of Knowledge) and a few (like Britannica and Compton’s) that come out with a new edition every couple of years. Virtually all their sales now are to public and private libraries, although a few cyberphobic old farts or traditionalist parents may prefer to turn the pages of a Britannica or World Book. (We bookmen never considered the schoolmarmish direct-sales folks from World Book one of our kind, and they most certainly returned the disdain. The WB salespeople believed their approach morally superior to ours, but they, too, would on occasion run into problems with consumer agencies for suggesting to parents that little Johnny needed their product to do well in school.) Even the institutional sales of these print sets won’t slice it much longer, not when the libraries get more computers and the current crop of cyberkiddies pack away the old folks to nursing homes.

I don’t know what happened to the millions of print encyclopedias sold door-to-door. Yellowing in attics and cellars, I’d guess. Save them long enough, though, and they may be collector’s items. I still have an old Britannica from the 1950s, which I use now and then. It’s easier to do that than to boot up the computer. And the old sets are relatively free of the politically correct mania that tends to distort history and biology.

Once, though, selling encyclopedias door-to-door was an integral part of the American landscape, a heritage of shoe leather stitched to the national dream of a better life through education. The ticky-tacky Levittowns that crawled from the cities in the wake of WWII would hardly be authentic without a band of bookmen and other slat-rappers marching over the manicured lawns. I saw written somewhere the phrase “as American as encyclopedia salesmen.”

Some cyke publisher or other once put out a feel-good pamphlet as a morale booster for his front-line troops, pointing up the shapers of history and culture who had in their youths peddled “subscription books.” (At one time encyclopedias were sold by the individual volume — buy the first one and “subscribe” for the rest.) Napoleon was there, a hawker of Diderot’s materwork, the world’s first encyclopedia. I think also Washington, or it could have been Lincoln. And a couple of 19th-century authors; Hawthorne may have been mentioned.

Not noted, and closer to our time, is that the father of James Carville, Bill Clinton’s close friend and chief campaign advisor, was a bookman. It figures: Carville himself is almost a caricature of a Southern con man of fact and fiction, mashing the aroma of magnolia with the smell of swindle. I’ve known a few of them, oozing Old South charm to coax birds from trees. As a matter of fact, anyone who has spent more than a few years as an itinerant peddler would instantly recognize Clinton himself as a top-of-the-line Dixieland bamboozler. It’s delicious — the on-the-street evanescence of the encyclopedia salesman transmogrified to Carville and his good pal, taking that old bookman bullshit to the highest office in the land.

I knew a bookman from North Carolina, Clay Purcell, who had breezed into New York. He didn’t much like the area (I think he was hiding to avoid child-support payments) and used to tell us to give it up, “because ah just done sold the last order in New York.” He thought the people cold and rude and claimed they let him past the door just to hear his Southern accent. Clay started out selling Bibles on Tobacco Road. He’d worn a turned-around collar and pretended to be a preacher. “Ah’d recite passages from the Good Book to ’em. Lots of times ah’d have ’em weepin’, but when ah tried to get ’em to sign up they’d say, ‘That’s a wonderful sermon, Reverend Purcell, but we already got five Bibles.’ ”

The danger of allowing a trainee to speak even a word or two to a prospect was illustrated by Clay’s story of the time he had taken a green pea (trainee) with him on an encyclopedia pitch. At one point Clay spread out a broadside for a set of children’s books and began to recite some of the stories and poems it contained. When he read off one called “I Love Pussy,” the hayseed trainee piped up, “Me too!” End of pitch.

Another time he was trying to sell a school principal, with his family gathered and gaping at the pretty broadsides on the living room floor. “Would you like to participate in the program?” asked Clay, going for the close. The schoolman looked at the bookman and drawled, “Quite frankly, Mr. Purcell, I don’t believe I care to fuck with it right now.” For years after, all who had heard Clay’s story would mock-drawl about a lost deal, “Quite frankly, they didn’t care to fuck with it right now.”

I got into the business off a blind help-wanted ad in lower New York State, where I’m originally from. Under the consumerist hammer, a lot of newspapers no longer accept blind want ads, but in the mid-’60s they were commonplace. “Public Relations,” read the one I responded to. “No Experience Necessary — x dollars per week to those who qualify.” I forget how much it was, but it amounted to three times what I earned as a 20-year-old wage-slave on the lowest rung of a nonunion warehouse. What I didn’t know then was that to “qualify” for the supposed salary, I had to “place” three sets a week, sets of Collier’s Encyclopedia, now defunct. (The P.F. Collier Company also owned the magazine of the same name.) I was so young and dumb I swallowed it. If I’d known I had to sell encyclopedias door-to-door, I probably would have crapped and backed out.

After two days of intensive classroom training and a few days in the field watching experienced pros toss their pitches, I was loaded into a crew car and dropped off in a countrified suburb. That first night I got into the third slat I rapped, hardly knowing what I was doing. Uncorking my canned pitch and making millions of mistakes, I blundered into a deal, selling a middle-aged (or so he appeared to me) banker with a young family. Cripes, was I high.

I couldn’t wait to get to work the next day. Running on that ancient sales elixir called enthusiasm, I did three laydowns the second night and wrote two orders, or “doubled,” as we called it. I was enveloped in such a fog of elation I said something to one couple so idiotic it reddens my face today. This young mother had an infant she was holding, patting his back while I made my pitch. Eventually, the baby burped, which distracted me from my sales talk. “Must have been something he ate,” I offered. She looked at me as if I’d dropped from some tree, but they ended up buying. Maybe they just wanted to rid their home of a dangerous lunatic.

I hit a dry spell the rest of the week, but with my three “placements,” I figured I’d qualified for that big money mentioned in the ad. I hadn’t — one of my orders kicked out during the telephone verification. But they gave me two-thirds of the promised paycheck. It finally dawned that I was working on commission. As I said, young and dumb, but it topped hauling boxes around a warehouse. The commissions amounted to about 15 percent to start, with a raise to 18 after ten orders, and to 20 once you became a field manager. Then you’d also receive a 5 percent override on your trainees’ orders. Because it was an impulse, or emotional, purchase, cancellations were always a problem, a negative factor countered by sales managers with the hoary pitchman bromide, “Throw enough shit up on the wall and some of it’s gonna stick.”

Pounding doors on a commission basis: something many would consider little more than a degrading stopgap, to earn enough to live until a real job came along. To tell the truth, I found it exhilarating, romantic even. Empowering, to use the modern buzz. A field manager would haul his neophyte crew to various suburbs where “pecker tracks” — signs of children, like toys or swings — abounded, and tell us he was dropping us into a “berry patch,” with lots of orders ready to be plucked. Hours later, maybe around ten at night and hopefully with a deal or two in our kits, we’d meet at the pickup spot, a bar, bowling alley, restaurant, or street corner. That a cluster of snot-nosed kids spouting a prepackaged sales talk could go amongst strangers and in one night draw thousands of dollars from the area seemed to me then mysterious, magical. In a way, it still does.

In four months I had my own car and my own crew. Now it was I who taught the canned pitch to the green peas and gave the field training. Hundreds came through the doors of that Collier’s office, and I would guess, multiplying it nationwide, countless thousands each year answered the blind ads, and that just for one company.

A lot of college kids were hired in the summertime. I say “hired,” but no one was actually an employee. Encyclopedia companies did not have sales employees, not, in any case, for their consumer market. You signed on as an independent agent, selling your business to the company, and you were supposed to pay your own unemployment insurance, taxes, and Social Security. This arrangement not only saved the encyclopedia companies a lot of money in bookkeeping, it also permitted them to deny to the authorities that they in any way authorized the tall tales told by the peddlers touting their products. The college boys were expected to leave when school started, but the dropout rate of even the regular hires, those who stuck around a few months and wrote some deals, was high. I’d guess not more than one in a thousand who went through the training stayed long enough to legitimately call himself a bookman. (There were hardly any female salespeople when I started out. The few women I’d heard of who peddled books freelance, independent of an office operation, were reputed to also be peddling something else on the side.)

Collier’s was a company rich in Irish-descended Catholic executives. One, quite seriously, told me selling books was “like the priesthood, Barry — many are called, but few are chosen.” By that time, I’d been around long enough to guess that the “chosen” were those too dumb, too misfitted, or too lazy to secure what the world termed a real job. Even so, the hokey words made me feel pretty good. At least until the next blank week, when I’d have to borrow money to survive until the deals began rolling again.

The presentation was a dissimulative classic of the soft-sell. It had, I’d heard, been put together by a legendary Collier’s executive back in the 1930s, when he was a humble slat-rapper. It was easy to teach. All the aspirant had to do was to memorize a couple of paragraphs, mostly the front talk, the first few minutes of the pitch, and a little bit of the close. If he got a laydown, he’d simply follow the cues provided by the broadsides and prospectuses, which were packed in the kit in the order they were to be pulled out.

We weren’t salesmen, of course. When someone opened the door to our rap, the pitch would begin like this: “Hi, I’m Barry Bridges, and we’re contacting a few families in the area to get their opinion on this public relations work being done by Collier’s. Don’t worry, I’m not selling magazines (ha, ha) — or anything else. We’re actually paying people for their opinion on this word-of-mouth advertising campaign.” Snicker if you wish, but it got me past many thousands of doors. Our stand-alone briefcase full of broadsides — the kit — was placed discreetly off to the side until we got past the door. To rap a slat and say, “Hi, I’m selling encyclopedias,” would get the salesman nothing but injured eardrums from hearing all the doors slamming in his face.

The pitch was that the company was coming out with a new encyclopedia and wanted to get recommendations in selected areas of the country to use in its advertising. “You know, folks, it’s word-of-mouth advertising, the most effective kind there is. Naturally, the company is willing to pay for these endorsements — with the encyclopedia itself. But only to qualified families, those who would promise to write a testimonial letter and, above all, who would genuinely use the books, now and in the future.”

If the avarice and interest were there up front, you went into the meat of the pitch, showering them with the big broadsides and leafing through sample pages in the prospectus, demonstrating what a great and needed product it was. And, surprise, we’d further pay them for their help with this beautiful set of the Children’s Classics, also a science library and a dictionary or home medical books. As we’d draw each new set from the recesses of the kit, we’d tell them the supposed retail price, always inflated, perhaps what the deluxe leather-bound products cost, but not the books with the cheaper binding that they would be getting. The “research service” let us really pump up the value of the package. This allowed them to send in 100 questions over a ten-year period and get “full reports on any conceivable subject.” We produced a letter from a prestigious accounting firm that audited company books and had discovered it cost an average of $8.53 to answer each query. “So, folks, that in itself is worth $853, over the ten years.” In fact, very few customers ever requested even one research report.

Repeating the words “ten years” was important, because the only monetary thing we’d ask of our qualified families was to keep the set updated. This was done with big, thick annuals — another broadside — which were sent each year for ten years. All they paid was the shipping, handling, and bookkeeping, $27.95 a year. (This was the late ’60s; the price had escalated to nearly $100 annually when I finally quit the game in the mid-1980s.)

Then we did the buildup, or the Chinese buildup, as we called it in those less sensitive years. With pen and pad we’d total the supposed retail value of everything, which would come out to something like $3500. And then we’d write in the measly $27.95 a year next to that hot-air value. Finally, we’d hand them a “release form” to sign, a printed card where they would promise to write a testimonial letter. Signing that made it easier a few minutes later to put their names on the sales contract.

You may think this pitch preposterous, maybe effective in a younger and more naïve America, but antiquated and ineffective today. If so, why do I, every other month, get a letter from one of my credit-card companies eager to reward me for being such a good customer with a free gift, usually some made-in-China crap like a calculator or clock. All I have to do is to pay $3.99 for the shipping. Is it because I was once a bookman that I damn well know the four bucks pays for the crap and the shipping and leaves a nice profit for the company? Effective pitches never die, they just eternally reincarnate.

The “conversion” and close wrapped up the pitch. “Well, folks, I knew you’d love the program, everyone does. Now before I ask you three questions to see if you qualify, let me point out one thing. Most people at this point ask us if they have to take ten years to pay for the program. No one wants to be on our books that long. And it’s too long for us as well. So what we do is to give you this little coin bank, and you put 30 cents a day in it and send us $10 at the end of each month. That way, in about two years the whole ten years of the program is taken care of. And for saving us all that bookkeeping, we reward you with…” This was the conversion, the switch from ten years to two. I had a few hardheads and wiseasses over the years who insisted on the ten-year contract, but only a few. Naturally there was no ten-year contract.

Now came more broadsides from the kit, a Bible and an atlas and, finally, something to put it all in, a bookcase. (The bookcase was actually five walnut-finished boards, shipped unassembled. When Sears Roebuck marketed the American People’s Encyclopedia in the ’60s, they dazzled by converting from ten years to two with a terrific-looking coffee-table bookcase.) That was it, an hour to an hour and a half. The contract would be signed, credit information taken, and the down payment, usually the first month, obtained. Delivery came by U.S. mail in three weeks. It was important never to thank a customer for signing up. Hell, the whole premise was that we were doing them a favor. Some of us had the chutzpah to congratulate the lucky family on our way out the door. And many customers would thank us for coming by.

Today’s consumer advocates would probably believe we should have been shipped off to the slammer for blatant fraud. They may be right, but I actually believed the pitch when I first heard it in training class, and continued to believe it for months. I likely couldn’t have sold it if I hadn’t. After a time, the constant repetition validated it internally. Sure, there came a point when I knew it was all smoke. But I knew it objectively, and I wasn’t selling objectively. It was a matter of making my living, pretty subjective stuff. Years later, when I read Orwell’s 1984, I understood what the author was talking about when he described “doublethink.” You know something may not be “true” objectively, but you internalize and alter the facts to fit the exigencies of the situation.

If I thought about it to any extent, I suppose I rationalized it this way: encyclopedias are beneficial in a home, but no one, or almost no one, ever gets up one day to go out to buy them — they have to be sold, the bookless must be persuaded. It’s said that life insurance is the same way, that most people don’t think of it until the policy guy calls them or knocks on their door. A few encyclopedia companies over the years tried to sell their product through department stores, as though they were refrigerators or furniture. All such attempts failed miserably.

So what I was doing, as one wry friend said, was “bringing culture to the masses.” I don’t know how many of the thousands of customers I sold ever cracked a volume. Not too many, I suppose. Maybe their children did. For some of the families, the books they bought from me were probably the only ones their four walls would ever see, decorative value for the bare patch in the corner of the parlor.

We romanticized the product, the deal. All salespeople do, to varying degrees. And while the customers were not getting the value they thought they were, they at least were getting exactly what they paid for, which is more than can be said for many other scams, past and present.

But I didn’t think about the ethics of the business to any great extent, nor did the salesmen I knew. We didn’t worry about it. Our customers felt good, and we were doing what we wanted to do. A college kid in my crew once said, “Well, if they’re being gulled, at least they’re being gulled for a good product.” That summed it up for me, and what else was I supposed to do? Go back to humping warehouse crates?

In the early ’70s I was in Northern California, the Oakland area, still in books, though I had also along the way sold baby furniture, the Compact vacuum cleaner (known affectionately to its peddlers as “the little green pig”), home fire and burglar alarm systems, and yellow page advertising. These are the journeys made by most direct salespeople: the better deal is just around the block. Tipped by another bookman, I had mostly given up cold canvassing and began to play the newlywed game. A couple of times a week I’d go to the county’s vital statistics office to gather the names, addresses, and other data of people who’d applied for a marriage license. In those innocent days, the local newspaper also carried that information. I’d take the name only if both parties were under 28 and the guy had a decent job. But not too good. Lawyers and accountants were out, ditto cops for the most part, though I’d occasionally hit one just for the challenge. I concentrated on the average Joe, even though on the East Coast I’d written up bankers, businessmen, and even the country’s best-known classical guitarist. Pipe smokers I also avoided when I could. All salesmen who need to get the prospect emotionally involved soon learn that only rarely can they break down the deliberative character of the pipe people.

In those days, the telephone information operator would give an unlimited supply of phone numbers. I’d call the newlys in late afternoon — “We’re paying a few families in the area for their opinion on some advertising work. Do you have a few minutes this evening?” — and try to make at least two or three appointments. If I couldn’t get a phone number, I might hit them cold.

I was selling for a small company in New Jersey that published a few children’s sets and got its encyclopedia, something called New Standard, from another publisher. There were a lot of little independent distributors around then, their ace in the hole being an ability to finance the paper. They hired freelance bookmen who had been through the wars with major companies and now wanted to work on their own, and for a generally higher commission than the majors would pay. The New Standard and the other small sets sold by these companies were not of the scope and quality of the majors. They were often referred to as “bastard” sets, even by those selling them. However, nicely done broadsides and a good prospectus could make any encyclopedia look better than it was.

I had a good relationship with this small company. They trusted me to the extent that they did not do the usual telephone verification of my orders, just sent me a check when they received the orders, and I’d always hope I didn’t get a refusal, a “decline to accept” on the part of the customer. (This happened maybe 5 percent of the time.) When a bookman I’d known on the East Coast blew into town needing a connection, I set him up with the company. For some reason, even though I did not vouch for this guy’s saintliness, they gave him the same privilege: no phone verification of the orders. He was OK for about six months, producing good business, and then I noticed he started gaining weight, neglected to shave, and generally deteriorated. He had broken up with his girlfriend. I thought he’d come around, but when I got a call from the New Jersey company, I knew he’d taken advantage of that small opening he had: he’d written five tombstones, got the money, and skipped town.

A “tombstone” was a phony order, as if the salesman took names from tombstones and put them on the contracts. They’re also called “fence posts.” The practice has been around as long as peddlers, part of the landscape of direct sales. In some parts of the country, getting paid on bogus orders is known as “hanging paper.” Even with a company that verified by phone, a paper hanger could pull it off by stationing confederates at the other end of the wire.

After I’d been in Oakland about a year and a half, I opened an office and hired young guys and girls, a few of whom did pretty good. I wanted to earn more money, and the only practical way to do it was by running an office. But the hassle of constant hiring and training wore me down, as did the unpleasant task of bailing out the green peas when they ran into problems with police armed with the Green River law. A lot of small communities throughout the country had ordinances called Green River, named after a burg in Wyoming that in the 1920s was the first to pass it. It required door-to-door salespeople to be licensed and registered, and that took time and money, so often the effect was to outlaw itinerant peddlers. Green River ordinances were promoted by local chambers of commerce, to keep the door-pounders out and the money in town. One nasty Green River burg in Solano County laid a $300 fine on one of my girls; I paid half, her boyfriend paid half. Then she quit, threatening to sue me for the part they had to pay. I was sorry I’d sprung for even half the fine.

These were also the early years of what one major cyke-company board chairman called “the Crunch.” The Federal Trade Commission was beginning to issue flurries of “cease and desist” orders to the big book companies for encouraging misrepresentation to consumers. They threatened fines and sometimes collected them. The companies would hide behind their traditional firewall, that they had no control over what the independent contractors said in anyone’s home. But the government was no longer buying it. They were going after the companies, not the self-employed peddlers. Besides, the salesmen had no real money and were often hard to locate, while the companies had deep pockets.

California in particular was getting tough on direct salesmen with less than immaculate standards of truth-telling. It was logical it should be so. It was, after all, the Golden State that birthed the so-called Suede Shoe phenomenon, the legion of swindling salesmen who during the ’40s and ’50s descended upon new owners of tract homes with various scams, many involving aluminum siding and home freezers. California was the first state to pass (around 1970, I think) the three-day recision clause for sales contracts written at the buyer’s residence. This allowed a purchaser to cancel the deal without penalty within three business days.

It was murder. Cancellations were always the burr under the saddle of the freewheeling in-home peddler. One week I wrote six orders and got paid on only two. Like many commission people, I’d spent the money before I got it. I experimented with various stratagems to cut the number of kick-outs, with only minor success. I finally figured that if they wanted to cancel, I’d try to get paid at least something for my time. Taking advantage of the fact that my orders were not phone-verified, I left a card showing the New Jersey company’s name but a local post office box address, which happened to be mine. “Should you folks have any questions at all about this order, just write to this address,” I told customers.

When someone wrote wanting to exercise his right to cancel, I wrote back stating he could certainly do so, for a “cancellation fee” that amounted to about 10 percent of the contract. He was to send this fee to the post office box, the check made out to a company I had set up locally for that purpose. I got away with it for a while, but eventually the New Jersey company found out and told me to knock it off. Also at this time, I discovered that the local Better Business Bureau had a “hot alert” out on me. It was time to move on.

Some may wonder why I didn’t toss it and get one of those putative “real jobs.” Or, as we slat-rappers would say of someone who didn’t have the stomach to stay within our ranks, “sell socks at Sears.” I’m not sure why I didn’t change occupations. It was probably because I resented being forced out of the business by the long arm of the government, of which I’d never asked anything. And I didn’t feel like selling socks.

I had once taken a field trip to San Diego with one of the salesmen I’d hired, and it seemed an interesting and pleasant town, with lots of military. I had written some military orders in Oakland, for sailors stationed at the Alameda naval base, and I’d noticed the cancellation rate was considerably lower with them. I supposed it was because the parents were far away.

Around 1975, I moved to the South Bay. San Diego County’s marriage-license bureau at that time was on the corner of Broadway and Union. You could find me there two or three times a week, gathering names and addresses from a big book the clerks would hand to you upon request: information available to the public. There were even a few tables to sit down at to transcribe the vital info. A lot of times the couple would be already living together, even when it showed the woman’s address as out of state. Occasionally a young couple came in to fill out the forms and you’d hope they wouldn’t recognize you when you hit them a few weeks later.

There were other salesmen there as well, other bookmen and hawkers of whole-life policies copying the precious data into their notebooks. I had only a nodding acquaintance with them, the way I liked it ever since being used by one of the breed in Northern California to facilitate the sale of books to the dead. Then, too, some of these guys couldn’t resist trying to hire you, to make the overrides, and I didn’t want to listen to their pitch. Once, years before, while going door-to-door in a driving rain, this guy in a big Lincoln yelled for me to come over. I knew what it was going to be about. I must be one helluva determined salesman, he said, to be out working in that glop. Come to his next sales meeting, he urged; he’d give me a deal I couldn’t refuse. It turned out to be a cookware deal. I went to the meeting and after a short pep talk, his salespeople started singing like a maniacal glee club their own words to famous fight songs, like Notre Dame’s “Cheer, cheer for our great cookware…” I pretended I had to hit the head and got the hell out of there.

Young enlisted men and their girlfriends who applied for marriage licenses had no idea of the parade of pitchmen who would soon be rapping at their doors or calling on the phone. They’d also receive a ton of mail from companies nationwide who’d purchased the mailing list. I’ve been told that around ten years ago privacy concerns persuaded the county to discontinue passing out this raw information to all comers, which must have effectively ended the newlywed game in San Diego.

Military couples (what I mostly worked, mixed in with a few prime young civilians, like maybe a guy in construction with a wife-to-be who was a student), did have a lower cancellation rate than civilians, but paranoia set in when one canceled. Although there was an unspoken gentleman’s agreement among the pitchmen not to kill each other’s order — else there would be a general bloodletting that no one would win — you really never knew. Unwritten accords may be effective among gentlemen, but shit, these were door-pounders.

The Navy and Marine couples rarely had the requisite down payment, usually the first month. The book companies required this but understood that the salesman would retain any payments made in cash, which sum would be deducted from his commission check. They also knew that the salesman would sometimes “front” the order for those short of cash. The companies treated the down payment as the customer’s money. When you fronted a deal you had to go back on payday, the 15th or the 30th, to pick up your money. (And, believe me, if you got back to collect your front a few days late, they’d be broke again.) Once I went back to pick up a front, to hear the kid tell me he’d changed his mind, he didn’t want the books. Sitting in his apartment was this insurance man I knew, a guy who also worked the newlys, averting his eyes from my gaze. I was certain he’d killed my order to pave the way to sell his policy.

I had been told by Jay, my encyclopedia-selling friend, that the insurance these guys sold to the newlys was crap. It was whole-life, which they presented not so much as insurance but as a savings plan. And a bad savings plan, at that. And that most of the young customers eventually stopped making the monthly payments, with nothing at all to show for their investment, except that the salesman got paid without chargeback after his commission had been covered.

I went to the library to verify Jay’s information, and it panned out. Life-insurance experts themselves were on record that it was a bad way to save and that if these customers wanted insurance — over and above what the military gave them — they’d be better off with term life insurance. I photocopied this information, and for about a year, when I didn’t sell a deal or had a kick-out, I’d mail it to the couple. I hope it cost the insurance rat some orders.

I’d met Jay late one afternoon when someone rapped on my slats. I was living in one of the Royal Apartments in Chula Vista, part of a chain of cheaply furnished apartment houses. Most of them have been sold off, but in the ’70s they were ubiquitous in the South Bay, catering mainly to the young military personnel living off base. I didn’t like surprise knocks on the door; a couple of months before, a bill collector had somehow found me and a violent scene nearly ensued.

This guy was pretending to look at a notebook he held. “Hi, I’m contacting the military families who would be continuing their education.” Yeah, I told him, I’m stationed at North Island and will start school next month. Something impelled me to kid him along. I knew I wasn’t in the age group he wanted, so I told him if he wasn’t selling encyclopedias, I couldn’t talk to him, because I’d been looking for a good set for some time. He eyed me, not knowing whether he had a mooch — a super-easy sale — or if I was maybe a cop. When I continued that I didn’t want to take ten years to pay for it, he laughed. “Bookman, right?” Right, I said. We made small talk, I wished him well, and thought that was the end of it. But Jay came back three or four times, wanting to know how I worked, who I worked for, telling me his MO, laying on the gossip. I found out he knew just about every slat-rapper in the county; he just liked to shoot the shit and party with the pitchmen. And maybe try to hire them for his own current deal, to glom the overrides.

Like me and the other bookmen, he wore a sport shirt, slacks, and the shined shoes while working. Ties and jackets were out — they screamed “salesman” to those who opened the rapped slats. Jay always carried a bottle of mouthwash in his car. He went to work earlier than I did and would often eat in the field.

He worked a “carding” system in the South Bay, one he claimed to have invented. He was irritated with himself for having shared the method with his album and insurance buddies, who now competed with him for the best locations. He would mark out 30 or 40 apartment houses with the highest concentration of transient military people. He’d check the places every few weeks, penciling in each new name on the mailbox. He had the name and the fact that they’d just arrived, valuable weaponry for a slat-rapper. He’d hit the door and if it had what he wanted — young military, even if single — he’d try to get in and go into his pitch. If it was someone older or obviously not military, he’d ask if he had the Lanson residence or some other made-up name, then apologize and leave. It was effective, and Jay put a lot of hours into it, working much harder than I ever did with the newlys. In today’s dollars, Jay was earning maybe $60,000 a year. A lot more than I, as I tended to goof off when I had a couple of good weeks. I once made a road trip to the military bases in Central and Northern California and wrote 22 orders, an exceptionally good month for me. After getting paid, I screwed around in Mexico for almost three weeks.

Some direct salesmen may scoff at 60 grand a year, and if you read the want ads today, that may look like chicken feed. But for an independent encyclopedia freelancer it was excellent. You could earn more, often a lot more, if you wanted to assume the headache of hiring and training a crew and living on the overrides. Jay was acquainted with a guy in La Jolla who ran a couple of crews of girls and earned serious money. And, said Jay, never paid a dime of taxes in his life. “He was just never on the books. He couldn’t be traced.”

Income taxes loomed a perpetual problem for self-employed salesmen. Nothing was ever deducted from our commission checks, and some peddlers never paid. Unless they hit the big income brackets and bought fancy cars or a home, they’d get away with it. It was almost an underground economy. I knew salesmen who peddled under phony names and Social Security numbers, working it for a while and then switching identities. The bastard book companies, and even some of the majors, knew this was occurring but went along. That the orders were genuine was all they cared about. Jay had problems with taxes, and I also dropped out of the tax system for a few years. Because salesmen can take a lot of deductions and because I wasn’t a superhigh earner, I never had to pay much tax and usually none at all. But one year I didn’t feel like digging up the records (I’d just moved and they were in storage), so I let it go, and without repercussions.

It didn’t surprise me that the bookman from La Jolla was making money with female sales personnel. “Bookwomen” doesn’t quite have the ring, but it was now a reality that they were virtually the only new hires. I knew a fella in Northern California who ran several all-female crews out of an office in Hayward. Women were supposed to be more loyal and easier to control, and they’d work for a lower commission rate than the males. The guy I knew was financing his own contracts, using one of the small, bastard encyclopedia sets and getting his other books from wholesalers. The girl who brought in the most orders, one of his male lieutenants told me, was rewarded by being allowed to spend the night with the boss. I had little doubt it was true. The girls I saw in his office resembled those Charlie Manson had gathered about him. But sending young women out at night to pound strange doors had its own dangers. A girl working for one of the major encyclopedia publishers (as an independent agent, of course) was raped and murdered in East San Diego about 20 years ago.

As a kid I’d been busted a few times for violating the Green River laws and spent a night in a local jail because I’d refused to pay a $25 fine (I had a hundred hidden in my car but didn’t want to cooperate with chamber of commerce extortion). There were other dangers. In some parts of San Diego, I didn’t know whether to lock my car or leave it open in case I needed a quick getaway. One dark night in a lonely area of Spring Valley I fought off two angry, snapping dogs, parrying their thrusts with the kit while slowly backing up to my car. But only once did I encounter even the threat of violence from a customer. That was in El Cajon. I used to like going to East County, or even North County, to hit the military newlys, because despite the greater cost and time it took to reach them, they were often moochier, not having been already pounded by Jay and his friends.

I was throwing a pitch at this Navy guy when in walked his mother-in-law and her boyfriend, a mouthy little Italian guy with a New York accent. Generally, parents walking in on a pitch is a signal to pack up and leave, as the case is forthwith hopeless. But I’d been getting such a positive response from the couple that I figured I’d plug along a few more minutes and see if Mom and Friend would keep out of it.

No such luck. Boyfriend laid into me almost immediately. “This is just a bunch of shit you’re talkin’, mister.” I asked the couple if they wanted me to continue. They nodded but didn’t ask Boyfriend to butt out. After a few more vulgar interjections, I packed my stuff and told them I’d call later. Boyfriend must have felt I was running from him, because he really got insulting now. I should have let it roll off my back, but the asshole got to me. As I left I invited him outside, alone. I was getting into my car when he emerged from the apartment, with the husky Navy guy beside him. “We’ll get it on if you want,” I hollered, “but only if you’re alone. You need protection?” I was probably sneering. The Navy kid said his wife told him he had to watch out for Mom’s boyfriend. I laughed and drove off. But I was so pissed, I couldn’t hit my other appointments that evening.

Jay had a more terrifying experience. He went back to pick up his front money from a young Marine. (There weren’t many of them in the South Bay, but a few who were stationed at the recruit depot lived there.) The kid put a bayonet to his neck and told him he wanted the contract he’d signed torn up. Of course, Jay did not have the contract. It had been mailed to the company the day it was signed. The Marine held the knife to Jay’s neck while he wrote out a statement that the contract was null and void. A new twist on the recision clause.

After selling a while in San Diego, I learned to avoid hitting the door of Marines older than 20. Much older than that, it seemed the Corps had their brains completely fucked over. Especially the drill instructors. The few I pitched before I wised up sat there wrapped drum-tight, eyeing me like a cobra eyes its prey. I half expected them to jump up and scream, “OK, asshole, gimme 50 pushups.” And their spouses seemed totally intimidated. Once though, it was a Marine wife who cost me the order. She was likewise in the Corps, and I asked, innocently, because I’d heard it somewhere, if it were so that lady Marines were called whams. This must have been some kind of inside-the-Corps sex joke or insult, as she frosted out and forced my early and empty-handed departure.

The seals were also suspicious of anyone outside their elite circle, but regular Navy kids were, by and large, great to work with. A young Navy guy from a farm state, just married to his high school sweetheart and living in San Diego on an E-3’s paycheck, was almost always a sure order. Sometimes I would throw in an extra book, like a nice volume on nature, and pay for it myself ($5 or $6 wholesale) to make the deal better for them.

Navy wives were different from the cowed Marine women. Even physically different. It’s a generalization, but the Marine wives seemed to be built slimmer, while the spouses of the sailors often tended to excess poundage. All the salesmen noticed this, and we’d wonder if it was because they’d do nothing but eat while their mates were deployed to the western Pacific, or Westpac. Eat or cheat, we’d comment about the Westpac widows, and while a few of them did the latter (sometimes with a peddler), most seemed to prefer the plate.

If a Marine wife wanted the books but hubby didn’t, there was no sale. In the jolly Navy, it was reversed. One newlywed wife loved the program, really wanted the books I was showing. I knew I had her, but I could see he wasn’t interested and would have tossed me out fast if not for his bride. He demurred at the close, and was she ever upset. “Could you excuse us?” she asked. “I want to talk to my husband privately.” Sure, I replied, and began to fill out the contract while she took him into another room. He was dead meat. They returned from their chat and his fingers almost froze signing up for the deal, but he gamely made it through. And the order verified, as I knew it would.

Navy higher-ups were apparently aware that young recruits were being visited by the direct-sales fraternity. In those days, if an enlistee defaulted on his payment, the collection departments of the company would write directly to his commanding officer (from information on the contract) and often the kid’s pay would be garnished. All in the interest of keeping good relations with the civilian merchants. (One book-company accounts collector told me that as a general rule, the Air Force personnel had the best pay record, Navy next, then Marines, and last Army.)

But the Navy sometimes struck back. Jay showed me a homemade comic book — given to him by a sailor living in one of his favorite apartment houses — put out by a legal officer at the Naval Training Center and distributed to the enlisted ranks. The none-too-flattering illustrations depicted the book, album, and whole-life pitchmen and their manifold lies and fallacies. The comic book didn’t have any effect on me; I just avoided for a few months contacting anyone who might have been stationed at ntc.

A few of the Navy people could give the pitchmen a lesson in the art of the con. I sold one such, living in a big complex in Pacific Beach. He had only six months left on his enlistment, and most companies would not accept that business, as they’d have no idea where he’d be after he got out. But because I wrote a generally high-quality (i.e., good-paying) order, the outfit I was then working for, in Chicago (which was once the center of the encyclopedia-publishing world), took just about anything I turned in.

The kid did not make a down payment, so I had to front the order myself. The company a few days later told me the order had canceled and they’d sent back the down payment to the customer, at his request. As they assumed I got the down in cash and kept it, they would deduct the amount from my next check. In other words, the kid had stolen my money and thought there was nothing I could do about it.

Well, wrong, barnacle breath. Sweeter than honey is how old Homer described revenge, and I have a sweet tooth. I had one key advantage: I knew where he lived; he did not know my address. And each car at his complex had its own assigned, numbered spot. Late one night I drove over and spilled bright red paint on the hood of his shiny gray car. He’d need my pilfered front money, and a lot more, to restore his vehicle’s luster.

Despite the noble effort of the ntc legal officer, at least some of the big brass at the San Diego naval bases were complicit in setting up lower-rank personnel to be pitched by an encyclopedia peddler. There was this middle-aged guy who lived here, I’ll call him Troy, who worked for one of the major cyke publishers. He was tight, very tight, with some of the admirals and other high-ranking officers. I know he put on lavish Christmas parties for them at his fine home, but if there were other quid pro quos — as we all suspected — I don’t know of them. Troy had a deal the slat-rapping street peddler would kill for. He had free and full access to the bases and ships. Once a month or so, he’d have the commanding officer herd the new enlistees into the mess hall, or some other sufficiently large area, to be treated to a book pitch. The price would be lower than we’d charge, but only because the package was smaller, to fit the limited budget of an E-1 or E-2. Troy could, and did, write 20, 30, 40 orders at one time. It’s called a mass presentation, and I’d heard that elite insiders at the American military bases in Europe and Asia engaged in the same lucrative practice. Just how these pitchmen achieved access to the bases I don’t know. Nice work if you can get it.

Shortly after Jay dragged me into his circle from my self-constructed cocoon, or “cave,” as he called one’s dwelling, he asked me to help him move from Pine Valley to Bonita. He liked country living; also pricey sports cars, entertainment systems, all those neat American toys. But despite his good income, he couldn’t afford them, could never quite get enough steps ahead of the shoe shine. He’d go into debt and stuff would get repossessed. While he lived in Bonita, his late-model Corvette disappeared from his driveway one morning. He didn’t call the cops because he knew it had been popped — repossessed for failure to pay. He bought his daughter a horse for Christmas. On credit. I told him to try not to let the horse get popped.

To move from the mountains to the South Bay, he obtained a big camper by telling a dealer he was interested in buying it, but could he have it for half a day so his invalid wife could see it and take a drive? He used the vehicle to help move his stuff and later apologized to the dealer that his wife didn’t like it. To a professional salesman, the turn of the world is a series of hustles, and if one can save you the cost of a rental, of course you go for it.

While I helped pack his belongings, and with Jay out of earshot, his wife happily offered nasty revelations about her mate. I can’t remember most of them; one of the less damning tidbits was that Jay never washed the soles of his feet. I didn’t want to hear this stuff, but it wasn’t a surprise that a bookman’s family wouldn’t be an Ozzie and Harriet clone.

Jay was a rather morose sort when not working, but in the field he put on a superfriendly, folksy persona, as though drawing a mask over his face. Suddenly, he’d be smiling and waving at everyone, people coming and going from the apartment house he was carding, even I think the dogs and trees. Many salesmen psyche themselves up to get into a proper work mode, but Jay’s act was a trifle bizarre because he didn’t really like his profession. He’d periodically take classes at junior colleges with some distant hope of becoming a teacher. He’d even half joke about selling socks at Sears, getting a job in one of the less abnormal sales positions, with a guaranteed check and regular hours. But the fast, easy-to-earn money was the sugar that always drew him back.

Off work, especially at home at night drinking cheap wine, he’d ridicule the business and the customers. The names of the various sets he’d sold at one time or another came in for special treatment. The New Standard was “New Scrotum,” and he’d cackle each time he uttered the words. The Americana, which he mostly sold, was “The Ameriskaner,” mocking the way one of his customers pronounced it. The idea of education he promoted through his sales talk was “smedgimacation,” as in, “Yeah, they just wanted to get some more smedgimacation.” World Book was “World Booook,” a parody of the way he imagined Filipinos pronounced the name of the encyclopedia they much preferred. “Eef eet eesn’t World Booook, we don’t want eet,” he’d mock, then he’d laugh and pour more wine. He had four or five sets in his home, prizes for sales contests he’d won. One Christmas when he needed the money, he sold them all through ads in the newspaper.

When I knew Jay, he got boozed almost every night. You work nights, and you get wound up while prospecting and pitching. It’s a hunt, it’s survival; all the neurons and electrons in your nervous system are snapping and bubbling. When the night is over, oh man, it’s hard to come down. We knew a local bookman who used pot to unzip his synapses. Sometimes I’d get sloshed with Jay; other times I’d close down some South Bay bar and then head for Tijuana to drink until dawn. But mostly I’d tick down by lying in my cave, reading until three, four, five in the morning, rarely rising before noon.

I asked Jay if he’d ever seen Death of a Salesman. “No, and I don’t want to,” he replied. I doubt he was familiar with the theme; the title told him all he needed to know, and he didn’t care to be further reminded of the downs of the slat-rapping professions. We did, though, go to see the documentary Salesman, about Bible peddlers traveling the country, selling scripture through church-generated leads. Jay seemed edgy watching the film and interjected loud, deprecating comments throughout.

But his private doubts and negativity never broke his disciplined work habits. The guy was out there every day, always pushing, often on Sundays as well. Once, he worked Christmas Day, spreading the broadsides among the decorated trees and the gift wrappings and came up with a deal. I had long ago lost that kind of fire; I worked with people, and well enough, and — paradoxical to some — partly so I could avoid what Sartre called hell, i.e., other people. In sales, I controlled the interaction. We followed my script, and I could usually keep everyone on the same page. Even so, the never-ending pitch sometimes made me feel I was running down a cosmic treadmill, and to maintain a semblance of sanity, I had to break off and loaf now and then.

I have the impression that all freelance salespeople — working on commission and miles from the home office — are dislocated, out of joint, in some way or another. I once hit this newly, a 24-year-old construction worker from Imperial Beach who had married a gal with two kids. It was an easy sale; the fella was the personification of Hiram Mooch. He had a “No Solicitors” sign on his door. We pitchmen loved to see those; it told us that the dweller inside had low sales resistance and would be easy if we could but get him to open the door. Sure enough, this down-home guy virtually yanked the contract from the kit to sign up. He told me that a few months before he’d bought a Bible package from a canvasser, and a while later the peddler came back, hitting him with a sob story, probably fictitious, and “borrowing” $300. “Good ol’ bighearted Tom,” my mooch said, ruefully, knowing he was easy, knowing he’d been had by some losing scumbag, but not really sorry for the way he was made. Bighearted Tom may have been a credulous mooch, but I think now he was the winner and we who sold him or stole from him the losers.

There were other morally botched characters who moved in and out of the book business in San Diego. Allen was a guy in his late 50s who’d been through the mill. In the 1960s he had a storefront on Broadway where he sold a cheap album/Bible deal to passing sailors. He stationed a young woman on the sidewalk to cajole the swabbies inside, where Allen would launch his pitch. (The lady was also in the Navy, earning a few extra dollars by working the sidewalk. Allen later married her.)

He ran for a while a book deal owned by a friend of his from Orange County, a guy who had conned a prominent California bank into putting up a large sum to finance a bastard encyclopedia distributorship, and then immediately defaulted on the loan. (A number of entrepreneurs got rich setting up their own small book companies, usually by living lean while financing the first few hundred deals. A lot of them, though, like Allen’s friend, could be described as Horatio Algers from Hell. One guy built a mansion in Chicago with a plaque outside: THE HOUSE THAT BOOKS BUILT. Not satisfied with normal profits, he’d add an extra coupon to the payment book — this in the days before computers, when bills were paid off with coupons. Only one in ten customers caught the fraud, and these he’d soothe by shipping them an extra premium, like a book of children’s Bible stories. The extra coupon “pays for a new Cadillac every year,” he explained.)

Allen and a handful of other peddlers would sometimes travel the country with a “dump it” deal. They’d buy wholesale cheap and often counterfeit junk, like watches or ovenware, print up and paste fancy price tags on the stuff, and go to small businesses with this pitch: “We were selling this at the county fair that just closed, and it’s just not worth it to us to ship it back for restocking at the warehouse. You can see that it sold for $150, but the boss said to dump it, so we’re giving it away for only $39.” Some of these guys were making $500 a day, or more, tax-free. It had its downs too, like the danger of a bust on Green River, or even worse, for fraud. One young bookman I knew was arrested at a downtown massage parlor for trying to dump cheap watches on the girls.

Allen later got into another kind of book business — bookmaking, in Mission Valley. Made good money, too, until the inevitable bust. Sometime after that he was busted by God and for all I know is now rapping slats in a fiery netherworld.

The really depressing characters were the old bookmen, those in their late 50s, early or mid-60s. These were harbingers of our future, much as we’d deny it to ourselves. One, who’d made mass pitches to the military in Europe and made big bucks, convinced me to drive him to Camp Pendleton so he could perform his patented magic. We’d split the deals 50-50. He lived with — lived on, that is to say — a woman in Spring Valley and wanted to help her with the expenses. He talked of the old times in Europe, the cars, the girls, the yachts, the $5000 watches. But he was burned out, hollow within, total toast. He couldn’t get himself together to talk to anyone in authority at the base, much less assemble a group of enlistees. He did succeed in talking me out of enough to buy himself a bottle. I had no use for this kind of inner collapse. If you can’t cut it anymore, loser, pitch yourself into the deep.

Jay had a few of these ancients attach to him. One was a courtly-looking guy who lived in Ensenada with his Mexican wife and many kids. Ted would come north a few times a year, when he sorely needed the bucks, and stay for a month or so. He still had a few pitches left in him, evidently. Once, when Jay was on the outs with his wife, he shared a motel room with Ted, who would “come down” from work with a quart of tequila. “Barry, when this guy gets drunk he starts reciting poetry, like an actor. You never heard anything like it. I can’t remember the poem, but it was long and told a hell of a story.” From Jay’s description, I surmised it was “The Face on the Barroom Floor.”

Another elderly burnout called himself Old Dad. Jay never had one of those, so this shopworn drummer tried to get to Jay through sympathy, stirring up bogus emotions. Old Dad was living with a widow in North County and driving her car. He’d already wrecked it once: Old Dad, of course, was an old lush. Jay was always looking to make overrides off whomever he could and, I think, advanced the old fake a few dollars until he could write a deal or two. Which he did. A deal or two or three, and not much more. It came to an end when one of his deals kicked out and Old Dad went back to the customer blotto, threatened him, and the police were called.

The book business was ideal for hustlers looking to land bigger fish, who sought to establish a false identity for nefarious purposes like credit-card fraud. Jay was working for a big outfit, Grolier, at one time, selling their flagship product, the Americana, through a small space at the Ward store in Mission Valley. I think the store may have gotten a percentage of each set sold, but I’m not sure. They had a “Free Drawing” display at the store, to win the set. I don’t know if anyone actually “won.” It was strictly for lead generation.

Jay got me to sell a few deals from this store system, but not for long. It wasn’t my thing, and I didn’t want anyone making overrides on me. That’s like saying that you play the game better than I, and I would never admit it, true or not.

A guy named Paul — that’s what he called himself — was Jay’s most successful hire. Paul was always there, hitting the leads, manning the display, answering the phone. Especially answering the phone. Eventually, he confessed to Jay why he was there: to set up a false identity, to go along with who knows how many he’d already used. He had it all neatly systemized and even wrote it up and gave Jay a copy. He was using his employment with the book company to get credit ratings, misstating how many years he’d been there and how much he earned. When the calls came to verify, he’d be there himself to confirm. (He’d taken Jay into his confidence because he could not always be at the phone, and Jay did in fact assist. Overrides are overrides.) I recall that Paul said he always claimed he was retired 20-year military, to fill in the blanks for a lot of missing time. The credit-card companies, Paul stated, did not check service records.

After he’d gotten a bunch of credit cards, he’d make some purchases, pay them off fast, and get regular boosts in his credit limits. When they considered him a supergood customer, he became their nightmare. He and his wife would then draw big cash advances, buy expensive jewelry, and take first-cabin world cruises. They’d done so a number of times. The few bucks he earned peddling books was just earnest money, a necessity for the big setup.

A year or so after the store deal closed down, I saw a picture of Paul in the paper. There would be no cruise this time, except to the slammer. They’d caught him trying to leave town in a hurry, after a local news show broadcast an alert on him. His wife explained to the press that her husband had found a credit card while out of work and just fell into temptation. He’d never do it again, she promised.

There were other, less adventurous, more workaday door-pounders in the area. In the South Bay they hung around places like Jimmy’s Restaurant on Third in Chula Vista and the Butcher Shop on Broadway or the coffee shop of a National City bowling alley.

One guy had a deal Jay really envied: his brother-in-law was a manager for a local finance company and bought the paper from his bookman relative as a favor to his sister. Finance companies rarely bought contracts for direct sales.

Jay at one time had tried to finance his own sales. If you can get enough orders this way, you can, once past the balance point, live on the incoming payments while writing more business, snowballing it into prosperity. It’s hard to start up because you not only don’t have the commissions coming in, you also have to pay cash up front for the products. He’d done it for a while, before immediate necessities demanded attention and he had to sell the contracts he had at a discount to a factoring company.

The fellow with the finance-company brother-in-law earned a lot more on his deals than we did, probably around 50 percent, some 15 percent better than we were doing. He’d buy the books himself and keep all the profit, except for the financing discount. “I get along by pooping out a few orders a week,” he told us. Later, Jay said that he could have gone a lifetime without having to hear such a disgusting statement. “He ‘pooped out’ a few a week. ‘Pooped out!’ ” I think Jay would have loved that kind of deal, poopy or not. I know I would have.

The album men were always at these hangouts. One of them seemed to have both wife and tax problems and regularly moaned about it. He worked a carding system for the albums. As Jay described it, the pitch was all “beautiful memories,” and mostly a lot of paper, no real substance. “At least we give them something they can touch,” said Jay. The album hustlers sold a nice album, a Bible, and certificates for portraits, enlargements, restorations, and film at discount, and sometimes a cheap camera as a converter. I don’t remember much crossover between the album guys and the bookmen. They seemed contemptuous of each other’s deals.

JJay got out of the book business in the mid-’80s, I think. He had a few successful self-employed deals and finally swallowed the corporate bit and sold socks at Sears — grabbed one of those “real jobs.” I’m sure he did great, but I don’t know, as I’ve not seen him in years. I got out of the biz a few years after Jay, going into institutional sales. More structured, but still on commission. At least I don’t have to worry about cancellations.

Nobody’s left. Not that I’d want to hobnob with them if they were. But the old rigmarole still flourishes. The wife of an elderly, disabled friend of mine saw a “free drawing” in a local department store for one of those electric scooters. She entered the drawing and my friend got a call a while later. He had won and would receive the item free, if he qualified. A home visit would be necessary to ascertain that. The salesman came out, and unfortunately my friend didn’t qualify, because he didn’t have $5000 for the scooter. He did get a call a few days later from the manager, who said they’d give him a $500 discount if they could use his image in their advertising. I was surprised they didn’t offer him some deluxe canes as a bonus.

America has an ambivalent attitude toward its salesmen. On the one hand, we revel in being called “a nation of salesmen” and we adore the freewheeling and entrepreneurial spirit. But we also hold “peddler” synonymous with snake, bum, and loser, and our shorthand for a deceitful lowlife is “used-car salesman.”

Success, I think, defines the salesmen we salute. A Ross Perot who gains a fortune can capitalize on the American fascination with rags-to-riches sagas to achieve public or political approval. But the underclass peddlers, the Willy Lomans, are deemed pathetic, born losers beyond redemption. Speaking for myself, the true sales stars are those with the intelligence to know when the game is up and a graceful exit required, who comprehend the difference between being persistent and being a noisy pest. Likewise, those who possess the spirit, the class that can’t be taught in a classroom, to put principle above the commission check. One bookman I knew back East had made his pitch and sat on a hot seat while the prospects agonized at length over whether to sign up. Finally they decided not to. The bookman packed his kit, left, and was about to drive away when the pitchee came rushing out the door to the car. “Hey, we decided we wanted it,” he told the salesman. Found money for most of us, but this slat-rapper had honor. “Too late” was his quiet reply as he drove off.

One group that in general lacks that quality, despite their often pious demeanor and pretense of being pillars of society, are the real estate hawkers, the bottom dwellers of our hustling breed. They’ll falsify the universe to secure a listing or a sale and never seem to know when to back off. If caught in a logical trap or outright lie, the salesman with most of his mind still intact gets out and heads for the next lead or the next door. Not the property people, who delight in pitching long, slow curves, obvious even to dullards. They apparently want you to congratulate them for getting up close and personal, to better breathe their bullshit directly into your nostrils.

The dollars I made as a bookman, all of them, were pretty much spent as they came in: easy money runs fast. But remembrances of how some of the money was earned still float in the canals of memory. When I first started working on my own, away from offices and crews, I pitched a couple, maybe in their 30s or 40s, with a Down’s syndrome baby. The mother grabbed at different parts of my sales talk, how this set of books or that service would help her son later on. Dad sat quietly on the couch, in obvious pain, but forbearing, allowing his wife to chatter on. If he had taken me aside and told me this was useless, I would have immediately packed and left. I wish he had done so. But neither of us wanted to break into the mother’s dream. It was an easy — but sad — sale.

In San Diego there was the E-3 who bought the package to send back to his rural high school, I guess to show them that he had finally made it big. And the couple who would buy only if I took in trade their 12-year-old World Book, for $50 off the price. I did, and sold it through a newspaper ad for $75. WB had good resale value, unlike the bastard sets most of the freelance bookmen peddled. However, I remember a woman in East San Diego who bought my bastard set because it had a small picture of and something about her idol, Elvis Presley. She nearly came to tears when she saw the few Elvis paragraphs in the prospectus.

I look back with neither anger nor regret at my life in books. We rode the dream, the shine of the shoes, the everlasting smile. We romanced the deal in the street poetry of commerce. It was show business, with all the exaggerations that implies. We were paid for our performance, but we also paid a price, unnaturally revving ourselves up to convince the suburbanite with mortgage unending that he was worth our time, that he was important enough to be worth a fine set of books in exchange for his opinion. It all seemed like a worthwhile trade-off.

And, when you’re young, it’s fun. It’s carefree. I’ve heard it said that direct sales on commission is a young man’s business. If so, I elected to put maturity on a long hold.

Maybe, too, we encapsulated a young country, a spray or two of the American spirit. One of the college kids who rode in my crew years back, for a company called Richards, made up this little ditty that he’d sing to amuse us as we drove to some berry patch.

We’re the Richards Company And we’re giving away books for free

Don’t you try to run away ’Cause you’re gonna get books today

We will seek you out and find you

As easy as one, two, three,

Don’t look back, we’re right behind you

We’re the Richards Company!

“As American as encyclopedia salesmen.” Well, maybe we were. What’s more American than “free”?

— Barry Bridges