No, he insisted, I don’t accept charity, just subscriptions. Yeah, I said, let’s cut the bull: for me a subscription to Snowmobile Maintenance is charity. Take the check. He wouldn’t. He had spent three years in a VA hospital and, I guess, he’d had enough of small deaths. He started, hung between crutches, to fill out an order form. It made me blind with anger. Perhaps there was fear as well: crumpled legs torment the self-assurance. I told him to leave. He left; he cursed me. It’s 15 high steps down from my office. I heard every step. That’s what the sales transaction can bring out in men. But, no: forget it. You can’t absolve me.
There are no territories in the Soviet Union. Salesmen personify what is right/what is wrong with capitalism: initiative, energy; humiliation, stress. Yet, despite all those small deaths, many salesmen live very well indeed. A rep told me: “People think we’re the lowest of the low. But they can’t do without us.” It’s true. They carry the marketplace on their persons. Salesmen are heralds between one sovereign state of commerce and another. They should be honored, immune as Mont-joy was before Henry V on St. Crispin’s day. They seldom are. Yet, at large expense of spirit, they make human the blind, instinctive thing that free enterprise is. □
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