Cold Rain

Chapter 13

Like a good trial lawyer, Gail fought three battles simultaneously. One involved complaints about procedural errors. The second argued definition of terms.

The last objected to findings of fact.

While I resisted an essentially technical defence, I took special satisfaction in one of Gail’s letters of protest. Having scoured the university handbook, she wrote the university lawyer to inform him that while smoking was prohibited in faculty offices there was nothing in the handbook, either explicit or implicit, prohibiting sexual intercourse.

Gail explained that by highlighting issues concerning the university’s failure to follow its own procedures and by insisting they observe definitions as written in their own handbook, we were essentially demonstrating the wisdom of finding a solution other than firing me.

The only trouble with this approach was the vice president’s committee would not really care how the thing played out in court. The committee’s concern would be focused on my actions. If we could make those understandable, even if we admitted wrongdoing, my chances of the whole thing going away would be excellent. Moreover, the appellate process would still be in place. In other words, I gave nothing up, but I had an excellent chance of finding closure for the case in committee.

‘What they want is a victory against sexism. In and of itself, that is more important to the committee than whether you are guilty of either sexual harassment or misconduct. They don’t care if a court brings judgement against the university for failing to follow its own rules. It’s not their money. The president might because he’ll have to find a way to pay you for a wrongful discharge, but the people sitting on your committee are idealists. They’re tired of male professors using the student body as their own private harem.

These proceedings might be confidential in theory, but nobody believes it. The people on that committee want to send a message to every male professor on campus.

That’s important to remember. They don’t want to fire you, David. They want to make a point.’

We had come to the critical moment. It was time for me to decide. Confess or tell the truth.

Gail had carefully kept the issue of my innocence in the subjunctive mood. Her letters on my behalf admitted nothing, nor did they explicitly deny guilt.

Every salesperson I ever knew who was worth his salt had been in a situation like this. You negotiate to a certain point, then hand the victory to your customer.

Even Tubs routinely employed this method of salesmanship. It’s written in all of the manuals: let the customers feel as though they have won a battle or two and you will always win the war.

This was all Gail wanted. If I let the committee members watch me grovel and weep, if I went down on my knees and begged for mercy, they would have no reason to forward a particularly harsh recommendation.

On the car lot, the easiest way to hand your customer a victory was to admit you lied. It assured buyers their view of the world was correct. While it cost the salesperson a bit of lost pride, the commission was usually sufficient to take the sting away. The classic case involved the salesperson delivering a final price. If that did not work, and it usually didn’t, the salesperson’s credibility was shot but not the deal. The solution was to bring in a new face. Management overrules the salesperson: the customer gets a victory and drives the car home.

Tubs was the only salesman I had ever met who would not stand for it. As a matter of principle, he never drew a line in the sand with a final price. He was too clever to get himself trapped by his own words.

His words were his weapons. He didn’t hand them over to the customer to use against him! And he never relied upon a single method to close a deal. His only go-to-close was in fact his go-to-hell-close, and he trotted it out whenever he got good and pissed off.

He called it his A Gun in my Face Close.

I saw it once, early in my sojourn in hell, but it was a thing of beauty, a memory as bittersweet as any I had of the old bastard.

‘I screwed up,’ I said, before I told Tubs anything else.

Tubs looked up at me. He had been examining his customer list, divining whom he should call at just that moment. Tubs was not a man to tell you a screw-up could be turned into an opportunity. He believed, on the contrary, every screw-up could be turned into his opportunity, so he smiled at me in his kindly, paternal way, already counting his fifty percent on my commission. ‘What happened, Davey?’

‘I told this guy on the phone the Mustang convertible is sixty-four hundred, and it’s seventy-four.’

‘Tell him you made a mistake.’

‘I did. He doesn’t believe me.’

Tubs held onto his smile, but it turned icy. He leaned back in his chair. Placidly, he folded his hands over his big belly. ‘Is he still here?’ I nodded. ‘What does he want to give?’

‘Five thousand.’

‘Have you got him sitting down?’

‘We’ve been at it for an hour. He won’t budge. He’s sure I’m lying.’

Tubs blinked. ‘Let me see what you have.’

I opened my hands. ‘Verbal offers. Milt told me to T.O. to you.’ A T.O. was a Turn Over, the act of bringing in another salesperson and thus splitting a commission. A good salesperson usually understood when it was time. Most people loved it when they got to make a T.O. to Tubs Albo. If they had a buyer and hadn’t gotten themselves stuck on a number, Tubs could get a signature and make a salesperson more money with half a commission than a full commission working solo.

‘Can Milt go sixty-four?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t even know about the car until this guy called.’

‘You mention a number yet?’

‘Just the seventy-four hundred. I’ve been trying to get him off five.’

Milt came into Tubs’s private office. He was a tall, roughed up looking man, maybe thirty-two or thirty-three years old. Milt was born ready for a fight, but he had a talent for giving back what he got, and he always treated Tubs with velvet gloves. Ask any manager in the world, when a guy sells twenty to twenty-five cars a month, he can do anything he wants. He’s the king, and Tubs was all of that. ‘Tubs, I got the invoice on that son-of-a-bitch-Mustang we bought last night.’ Milt’s voice was rotten with cigarettes. He shook a slip of paper at the two of us.

‘This cowboy doesn’t believe David screwed up on the price, and he’s not budging. Where did you get that price, David?’

‘Larry told me,’ I said.

‘Larry! And you believed that lopsided set of duck nuts?’

‘I hadn’t seen it,’ I said. ‘I had the guy on the phone, and I had to trust Larry.’

‘Next time trust that he’s lying!’ Milt turned his attention to Tubs, his voice going soft again: ‘We’re going to lose this guy if we’re not careful, Tubs. I can’t afford to go sixty-four, and five is, well, he’s just pushing David around to see what we can do.’ The way Milt said he couldn’t afford to go sixty-four suggested to me that if pushed that was a good number. Tubs could automatically add five hundred dollars to such a figure for an excellent commission, even after splitting it. I knew, too, that if I could figure this out, Tubs understood it completely. The numbers were locked in. We had to move the guy, and anything around sixty-four was good, above that, golden.

‘Does the guy want the car?’ Tubs asked. Tubs always liked to know that before he’d go make a pitch. Amazingly, not many salespeople bothered asking that question. But Milt knew people. Milt had gasoline in his blood. He smiled with big yellow horse teeth. ‘Tubs, the guy is creaming his jeans, but he’s getting mad. Now, look, I want you to take this invoice to him and show him just what I paid for it last night.’

‘I don’t need an invoice.’

Milt got just a little excited, considering he was speaking to the Zen Master of the Wastelands: ‘He’s a hard-headed cowboy, Tubs. He wants the car. He just doesn’t want us to screw him.’

Tubs rose, a man called to his sacred duty. ‘I’ll screw the son of a bitch, and he’ll like it. Introduce me, Davey.’

Tubs shook hands and sat down where I had been sitting. The two of them were laughing almost immediately. I’d worn the man down with my young man’s grim determination, and Mr Dietrich was glad just to have a man his age to talk to. ‘Now Mr Dietrich, Dan, can I ask you a question?’ Still pleasant, but Tubs’s smile had screwed down a little tighter, and Dietrich could see we were about ready to give him the car.

He nodded. I could smell eager coming off the man.

‘Do you want the car?’

Mr Dietrich waited almost sixty seconds to see if Tubs would trample over his own question, but Tubs just held his gaze and waited for the answer. Finally, Dietrich reared back in his chair and blew hot air. Last inning, he couldn’t play too coy, but he wasn’t going to throw away everything he’d won, either. ‘Maybe.

But I don’t want it for sixty-four! I told your son, I’ll go five!’

‘He told you the price was seventy-four.’

‘On the phone, it was sixty-four! I get down here, and you all raise it on me.’

Tubs’s smile was gone. ‘The moment you got here, David straightened you out. He told you he’d made a mistake, didn’t he?’

‘That’s what he said.’ Mr Dietrich was good-natured about lying salespeople. He was an old man. He had scalped plenty of liars.

‘He said it because it’s true,’ Tubs had gone just a little red in the face, the way a preacher will when he gets to his favourite verse.

‘Even if it was true-’

‘Whoa, now, wait just a minute, please.’ Tubs held one hand out to command a full stop. His other hand still held a Cross ink pen over a blank contract.

Sometimes it was his lucky pen that no one ever touched except to sign a deal. Today, it was just one of two choices: sign or swing, friend, one or the other. ‘I’m going to tell you something, and I’m going to tell it to you once. My boy’s an Albo, and Albos don’t lie, not out here, they don’t! David here will shoot straight even if it costs him. I taught him that. If anyone catches him lying, I’ll buy the deal and give the car to the person he’s lied to! Then he’ll pay me back every penny if it takes him the rest of his life!’

‘I’m sure-’

Tubs broke over Dietrich’s condescension without waiting for him to set it in stone. ‘The price on my car is seventy-four hundred dollars, and I don’t care if you put a gun in my face, it’s not going for a penny less.’

‘That’s just bullshit.’

‘You think?’ Tubs nearly came over the desk. The two men stared at one another like they were about to fight, then in total dismissal of the man, Tubs walked away. ‘Come on, Davey.’

As I followed, I heard Mr Dietrich crow, ‘You’ll have that car marked down to sixty-nine by tomorrow!’

Tubs didn’t react. I had thought he would. It had taken us some effort, but Dietrich had finally accepted that seventy-four was our list price. The fact that he had mentioned sixty-nine meant he was ready to close. All we needed to do was settle on something in the mid-six-thousand range and Dietrich had a car. And more importantly, Tubs and I had a commission.

Tubs was having none of it though. He put his back to that man and didn’t slow down. In his private office, he sat down at his desk again and resumed looking at his list. I stood next to him quietly. Milt came into Tubs’s office a minute or so later. ‘What happened?’

‘A Gun in my Face Close.’

Milt reeled back the way a kid will when someone farts. ‘Not the Gun in my Face Close, Tubs!’ Tubs lifted his eyebrows, a definite yes in his vocabulary. Milt groaned. He knew a buyer when he saw one. ‘What was your number?’

‘Seventy-four.’

‘Full pop? Not full pop, Tubs!’ Milt was screaming now, albeit in whisper mode. No sense letting the customer know the troops were divided. Tubs’s eyebrows flickered. Full pop and not a penny less. Milt kicked a file cabinet. ‘Nobody pays full price at a car lot, Tubs!’

Tubs was calm. He had gotten full pop before and he would again, but he understood Milt’s position.

Milt wanted a sale, not a long shot. ‘My man will, or he won’t get his Mustang.’

Milt invented sexual positions for the saints of three different religions. He seethed. He sighed. He prayed for someone to shoot him and put him out of his misery. Then he looked at me. ‘How high will he go, David? Best guess.’

I looked at Tubs. Tubs nodded. ‘He said something about sixty-nine. He’ll go sixty-nine, I think, or real close to it.’ I was stretching it, vainly hoping I could move my father down five hundred dollars. I wanted the sale as much as Milt.

Milt spread his hands happily. ‘Sixty-nine is good, Tubs. I can live with it. He can live with it. Can you live with sixty-nine, Tubs?’ Tubs shook his head. He was sitting tight on seventy-four. ‘Everybody likes sixty-nine, Tubs!’

‘He called Davey a liar, Milt. I won’t have that.’

‘How about I send Davey back. It’s out of your hands. You have nothing to say about it, right?’ Milt looked at me. ‘Go back and tell Mr what‘s-his-name he bought a car if he’ll go sixty-nine.’

‘Davey.’

I knew the tone, and I froze.

Milt rushed to my defence with a touch of desper-ation. ‘It’s not you, Tubs. He called Davey a liar. Not you.’

‘You can send Davey out if you want, Milt. You’re the manager. You can do anything you want. You do it, though, and I’ll be selling Buicks before the sun goes down.’

Milt kicked the empty air. ‘This close never works, Tubs! Let me go in and buy the deal for sixty-nine.

I’ll pay a commission for seventy-four. That’s good, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t care if I sell that car or not. I put my word on it, and that’s that.’

Milt cussed blue smoke in a murderous rage, but he left the office. There was no dealing with Tubs when he got to the issue of his sacred word. I heard Milt on the loudspeaker a few minutes later. He started calling out the specials of the day. He read an interminable list, and then he came to the Mustang. His voice rasped in an awful car salesman’s seduction, cylinders, litres, and miles per gallon, ‘…seventy-four hundred dollars. A steal at that price, folks.’ He named a couple more cars and shut up. He paced on the makeshift tower and smoked. He smoked two cigarettes at once.

Mr Dietrich sat for thirty minutes at my desk, absolutely alone. Nobody approached him. Nobody got within fifty feet of that desk. Finally, Mr Dietrich came to Tubs’s office. He leaned through the doorway, actually. He wasn’t coming all the way in. It was a gesture that announced clearly he was about to make a last offer. ‘I’ll go sixty-nine, against my better judgement.’

Tubs didn’t even contemplate it. ‘Mr Dietrich,’ he said, ‘You need a gun in my face and another five hundred dollars.’

Dietrich was a horse trader from way back, but he laughed. He laughed hard. It was over. He didn’t have a gun, he said, but he thought he could find another five hundred dollars for a car that nice. ‘Assuming, that is, you all pick up my sales tax.’ Tubs smiled and said he could do that, he surely could.

Later, Mr Dietrich told me, ‘You got a ways to go, David, before you’re as good as your old man.’ He thought about it fondly for a minute. ‘Gun in my face and another five hundred dollars!’ Mr Dietrich shook his head and laughed again. ‘I never heard that one before!’