Bainbridge Island Trip – Part 2
We finally made the trip to Bainbridge Island last week and it was a success. We both agreed we want to move back to the island as soon as possible.
During our visit we went to our favorite restaurant, the Island Grill, where, at one time we even had our “own table” with a name tag on it because we ate there several times a week. We also visited the Town and Country store, which has been a fixture on the island since 1959.
Somewhere along the line, I also picked up a cold germ that, I guess, had a desire to relocate.
Oh, yeah, Happy Halloween, and remember to set your clocks back.
© 2009 Moody Publishing Co
The Trampoline Salesman, part 2 of 4
Homeowners at 623 Sycamore Drive never stayed very long. Why is anybody’s guess. Two years was usually the tops. This was right next door to Buck White, understand. The only home on the block without a trampoline in the backyard collecting a layer of crud. Buck White had never sold a trampoline to any of the residents at this address. The closest he had come was when a bunch of stoner-bubs lived there. A young man had answered the door. He tried to shield his bloodshot eyes from the sunlight. Buck White helped him out by stepping inside and closing the door. “Let me shut the door for you, neighbor. I live next door and I noticed from the alley you were the only home on my block without a trampoline,” Buck White said. The smell of cannabis filled the air. “My name is Buck White. I sell trampolines for Flyboy Machines.”
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“Umm, yeah,” said the stoned man.
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Buck White helped the man into the living room where the others were. They were all stoned beyond stupidity. He did his presentation without interruption. When he was finished he asked for the sale. No one responded. Maybe they couldn’t respond. One of them finally muttered, “We don’t want any trampolines.”
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“I’m not feeling that here,” Buck White beamed with delight. “I’m feeling a room full of enthusiastic bouncers!”
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“Trampolines are for kids,” A girl told him.
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He knew what she really meant. Tell me more about Flyboy Machines trampolines, Buck White.
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Buck White spelled it out for them in plain English. He told them he believed marijuana was still illegal. He explained to them they weren’t going to call the cops. His second point was that none of them were physically capable of removing him from their stoner-bub dwelling, totally incapable of harming him for that matter. Too stoned to shit. His final point was they were stuck with Buck White for the duration of the day and possibly into the wee morning hours, so no more movies, musings, or sitting around taking up space. Buck White would be talking. Buck White was going to be their shaman on an all-night ride through the trips and munchies. Trampoline talk only, thank you very much. Who wants one, Jack?
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Technically speaking, no goods or services were exchanged that day at 623 Sycamore Drive. And for his hour-plus visit, no trampolines were purchased. Instead, a collection plate in the form of an empty nachos bowl was passed around the group. The stoner-bubs emptied their wallets and purses. The fundraiser took in one-hundred and twenty-three bucks. The compromise was to pay him to leave. Buck White was a reasonable man. “You got off easy,” he said at the door. “In the next hour you’ll be brainwashed by some commercial. It could be the one about that grossly oversized burger. It could be about a car, a technical college ad, or adult diapers. It could be about the latest pizza special. This special commercial—whatever it may be—will infect you. Get right underneath your skin. You’re all brainwashed cattle with disposable incomes.”
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They had nothing to say to any of that.
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“Think fast, wet rags.”
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This was right next door. And that was the closest he had come to selling a trampoline to a resident of 623 Sycamore Drive.
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Close doesn’t cut it, Jack.
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There were too many commercials. There were too many Roger Allens in the world.
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0 for 9.
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First attempt was with an elderly couple. The husband could barely hear him. Clutched. Second attempt with some white supremists, also clutched. Junky, dropout, drifter, fugitive—clutched, clutched, clutched, and clutched. Another junky, clutched. There was the delusional woman who believed she was abducted by aliens she called Grays. These aliens were small like midgets with long, twisty penises. She was fucked in zero-gravity every night aboard a flying saucer. She didn’t need any trampoline. Clutched. The stoner-bubs paid him to leave. Close, but no cigar. Clutched. Clutched to the ninth degree. The word from the bird was Buck White couldn’t crack 623 Sycamore Drive. This was right next door.
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“I’m going out on top, Jack!” shouted Buck White. He put the van in gear, passed the suburban in the driveway to get a better view into his neighbor’s home. The shades were up. The glow of a television set. Shadows of moving bodies. Somebody was home, alright.
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He took a very long swig from the flask. Jack Daniel was his motivational speaker. “Take a right at the next right and go back,” Jack Daniel said. “Crack 623 Sycamore Drive and meet or beat Roger Allen. Two victories, one trampoline, Jack!”
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The van took a right at the next light. It sped down the road and banked sharply into the alley. Buck White yelped like a coyote. He drove past four homes with trampolines in the backyards. Kids were never seen on them. Only the footprints of trespassing squirrels and cats. Sometimes critters left little chocolate surprises. Leaves and dust also collected atop these abandoned Flyboy Machines. But that was okay. Someone would come along and clean it all off with a garden hose every Sunday. That was the kind of neighborhood this was. It was straight out of a commercial for everyday people in everyday middleclass homes.
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He parked the van, unloaded and assembled the 16-foot Sky Lark trampoline in the backyard. No one took any notice.
No one was answering. Buck White could hear the television blaring inside. He tried the door and found it unlocked. This was no different than seeing a welcome mat. Inside he went. “This is your neighbor next door, Buck White.”
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No reply.
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In the living room, a woman in her thirties, slack-jawed, gaped at one of those reality shows. Her children, a boy and a girl of some nondescript age, were typing away on their laptops. They didn’t notice Buck White standing in the room.
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“Hello,” Buck White said.
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“Hi,” they all mumbled.
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“I’m your neighbor, Buck White. Your door was open. Thought I’d make sure everything was okay.”
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“My realities,” the woman said.
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Only it was a commercial now for shampoo. The woman ran her fingers through her hair. She couldn’t look away from the commercial woman lathering up her commercial hair in the commercial shower.
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The young boy looked up. “Aren’t you the guy who sells trampolines?”
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Buck White smiled. “Would you like to see one?”
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“I guess,” said the boy.
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“Can I show your kids the best trampoline in the whole wide world, miss?” It wasn’t a question coming from Buck White. It was a declaration.
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“My realities,” said the woman.
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“But mommmmm,” began the little girl. “I’m chatting online with Amanda!”
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The Internet was Buck White’s enemy.
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“My realities,” repeated the woman.
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Buck White was all about problem solving. “Why don’t you kids bring your laptops with you? I’ll show you what a blast trampolines are.”
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The little girl looks to her unresponsive mother then to her brother. “But I can’t get a signal out there!”
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The little boy said, “Yeah you can. You just gotta sit by the barbeque grill.”
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That settled the matter. The kids followed Buck White into the backyard. The Sky Lark trampoline should have inspired awe. This was one of Flyboy Machines’ top-of-the-line models. You could have a birthday party on that thing. The safety net around the unit was seven feet tall to keep the little ones safe. The vinyl pad was black with sleek geometric shapes etched into it. It was out of sight, Jack! There were two-hundred springs (most in the industry) which made up Flyboy Machines patented shock-absorption system. It could be tuned to a single individual weight of one Roger Allen or to a combined weight of up to one-thousand pounds.
Creative Commons
Photo by Charles Miller
I knew I wouldn’t be meeting this week’s deadline due to some family coming out for a visit, so I decided to throw something out there that some might find useful (why don’t you just do this anyway, you might ask? The answer: You couldn’t afford my proposed living expenses in Prague). Well . . . here it is, a short and pragmatic posting for those working the Internet seams in search of a virtual payload of coal.
Creative Commons is way to share, distribute, and sell your creative media works without involving Corporate America in your efforts. You can also find others who are willing to sell or share their works. At the very foundation of this endeavor is the license (and subject to appropriate copyright protections), which is easily tailored by the user to suit his or her needs. Bloggers will find this site helpful in that they can now quit ripping off photos from the Internet for their posts; they can now search Creative Commons for an appropriate image which would allow legal derivative use without a fee. Music lovers will find new and interesting music to download (some for free, some for a charge). Users will be quick to discover vast data bases hosted by other companies who subscribe to the Creative Commons enterprise.
The founders of Creative Commons deserve more than a pat on the back for their support in keeping the Elite One Percent OUT of the remaining 5% that is left for us. Please visit their site here.
A Trip To Bainbridge Island – Finally!
We have been planning a trip to Bainbridge Island for quite some time and this weekend, with all the rain and storms in the Seattle area, we are finally going to make it happen.
We lived on Bainbridge Island for nearly eight years and we really enjoyed the lifestyle. It is a nice balance between the rush and excitement of Seattle and the calmer, quieter feel of a much smaller community.
Bainbridge Island, in fact, was once the summer getaway for some of the more prominent members of the Seattle business community in the early twentieth century.
One benefit from those times is the 206 area code. The rest of Kitsap County has a 360 area code, which makes calling Seattle a long-distance call. This was especially the case when phone service was initially established from the island to Seattle. To resolve this inconvenience those prominent members of the Seattle business community convinced the phone company to put the island in the 206 area code, making a call to their offices in Seattle a less expensive and more convenient local call.
While on Bainbridge one of my more interesting neighbors was Walt Woodward, who lived in the condo directly beneath us. We did not develop a close friendship. It was more of a passing wave-type relationship and a morning (or evening) “Hmmph!”. Walt had been the publisher of the Review Journal newspaper during WWII. When the Japanese were taken off the island as a result of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he used the influence of his newspaper to protest.
While living on Bainbridge Island, I worked for a commercial alarm company, dispatching fire and burglar alarms throughout Kitsap County. It was a great job, especially after 5PM in the afternoon when the managers went home. I had the offices and the alarm center all to myself and except for the occasional emergency dispatch, it was a very calm and quiet job.
The owner of the company sold it to a much larger organization in Seattle and moved to Joseph, Oregon. His employees, including me, were not happy with the change, but we took it in stride and moved on.
One of the reasons my former boss gave for moving to Joseph was that Bainbridge Island had gotten too big and he wanted to be in a smaller community. When I spoke with him the other day he said he is thinkng about moving to Tuscon when his youngest son goes off to college in a year or so. Go figure.
The purpose of our trip is to decide whether we want to move back to the island. We both want to return to the Puget Sound area, but of all the places we’ve lived, Bainbridge Island is the only one we can agree upon. It is a very active community with a community theater, its own cable TV station and a diverse and very passionate Chamber of Commerce.
When I told a friend of mine about our trip he told me to stay dry. Right.
© 2009 Moody Publishing Co
The Trampoline Salesman, part 1 of 4
- Photo by Steven Erdmanczyk
Buck White’s favorite saying was, I’m going out on top, Jack! He wore a gray flannel suit with cuff links, white shirt, and red tie. Sometimes he wore a matching hat, sometimes not. The word from the bird was he was stuck in the 1950’s.
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Buck White was a trampoline salesman at Flyboy Machines. He had it made in the shade these last fourteen years, number one in sales since he hit the streets at age twenty. He sold his future boss a trampoline before he even got the job. That was his interview. His boss had remarked, “That’s one crazy son-of-a-bitch. He’s a walking commercial; never seen anything like it. The kid’s a goddamned machine!”
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Buck White was one-of-a-kind. His heels were always on fire, Jack. He preferred the hustle and bustle of going door-to-door and closing the sale with a toothy smile and a lightning quick handshake. “Thanks for choosing Flyboy Machines,” he’d say. “Your little ones will have a blast.” He’d turn away and douse his gums with a shot from the flask. He’d split with an offbeat comment like, “Think fast, wet rag.” Sometimes they heard him, sometimes not. If they did, they had no idea what he was talking about. His kind of talk was radioactive half a century ago.
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One more sale, he told himself. The mirror smiled back at him. He rinsed his face and dropped his hat on the floor. He performed the Fred Astaire trick he learned as a kid. He kicked it up into his hand and plopped it down stylishly onto his jelly roll. He spun around and tapped out a snazzy rhythm.
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“Time to get kookie,” the mirror told him. “Time to meet or beat Roger Allen.”
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Roger Allen was a slug. He slimed around all day at the big outlet stores next to the bikes and punching bags and assorted workout equipment. His post was a cheap fourteen-footer trampoline on which he occasionally bounced without enthusiasm. It didn’t matter. The kids couldn’t miss the three-hundred pound behemoth making animal noises. The worst one was his monkey call. They could hear him all the way over in the women’s undergarment section. Mothers lost their children then. They lost their little squids to a two-bit sharpie that wore adult diapers that could withstand up to twenty-five times their dry-weight, water-proofed with polypropylene backing. The man was a cheat and a fraud. His diseased heart wouldn’t last two houses going door-to-door, Buck White concluded. The perennial stench of the man’s britches should earn him a diaper change by adult-protective services. Buck White hated Roger Allen. His kind was about depreciation. His kind had no work ethic. His kind was taking over and Buck White resented it.
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Roger Allen, just one sale ahead of Buck White—only two hours left in the entire sales year.
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“Meet or beat Roger Allen,” the mirror repeated.
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Something had been nagging at him for several years—623 Sycamore Drive. “Put it out of your mind, Bucky boy,” Buck White said. “Fertile grounds across town. Twenty-nine sales last week, all high-end stuff.”
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“You’ve got just two hours,” the mirror reminded him.
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Buck White always knew the time.
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The van could be loaded with a couple kits and he’d be across town in twenty. He’d have time for two visits tops. Trampoline sales took time. Buck White had all the skill sets of a highly effective salesman. He also had a few tricks of his own, the kind they don’t teach you at sales training seminars. He didn’t like speaking to customers through screen doors. He didn’t like standing on the front porch. Talking to each other like real human beings could be accomplished within the confines of the home. Buck White’s policy was when the door was answered he’d just go right in. And by-and-large, they let him do just that. So many people just letting him walk right by and into their homes like they were trained that way. More often than not, Buck White would be inside the home of his customers before they knew his name. Like they were trained. The same way television commercials were uninvited. It took training and plenty of it. Most consumers were trained real good. Commercials on, inhibitions off. Commercials were consumer’s two-dimensional houseguests. They told them when it was time to buy. And they never went away. Buck White was a human being. He wasn’t a walking commercial like his boss said. That was where the lines were blurred. Buck White would leave.
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He packed the van with a cheap twelve-footer and a deluxe, 16-foot Sky Lark. He still wasn’t sure where he was going to go. Next door, at 623 Sycamore Drive, somebody was home. A suburban was in the driveway. He thought he heard children.
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Buck White shut the van door, took a shot from the flask.
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To compete against commercials and slugs, he had another survival tool at his disposal. This trick was never taught at sales seminars or business schools. It was only taught at the Buck White Door-To-Door University. He adopted a tactic from his adversary, The Commercial—
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Stay until they change the channel.
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Professor White would have taught his students that the Golden Rule of Sales is to stay until they change the channel. When all the students would raise their hands, he would call on the biggest troublemaker to satisfy everyone’s sadistic urge to protest a new way of doing things. “Johnny Smart-Ass, you have a question?”
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“Stay until they change the channel? You’re not supposed to piss people off, Professor White,” he’d say. “What if they don’t want your cruddy trampolines? You’re supposed to move on and sell to someone who is receptive,” Johnny Smart-Ass would say. “You gotta be pragmatic.” The students would all agree, nodding their heads.
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“Wrong, wrong, wrong! Mister Smart-Ass,” Professor White would begin. “If you want to be pragmatic, you make the sale the first time around. You stay until they change the channel! You want to be a slug like Roger Allen? You want to end up a writer of commercials? Make the sale at door number one.” Professor White spelled it out for them, Jack:
Do not leave a home until you hear something like, ‘I’m calling the cops if you don’t leave.’ Or something like, ‘If you don’t leave I’m going to kick your ass.’ There are endless variations, but the keywords are ‘cops’, ‘kill’, and ‘kick’. There are subsets for cops, such as ‘call’, ‘police’, and ‘9-1-1’. For kill, one could safely include ‘murder’, ‘mutilate’, ‘blast’, ‘shoot’, and ‘destroy’. And for kick there were also words like ‘beat’, ‘punch’, ‘bash’, and ‘fuck-you-up’. The general rule is if there are weapons pulled or any of the key words spoken, then it’s time to move on.
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If you heard, ‘I think you should leave now’ or ‘please leave my home’, then it doesn’t count. Neither does ‘get out of my house’ or ‘get the fuck out’. There were always gray areas. Once Buck White entered a very large man’s home. The man didn’t say anything until the salesman finished his spiel. He stared at Buck White with a homicidal look and said, “Suck my cock, freak show.” Buck White considered the channel changed. He learned that the threat of cops and bodily harm were the only reasons for leaving a home. Anything else meant, ‘please tell me more about Flyboy Machines trampolines, Buck White’.
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They don’t teach you these things in sales seminars. They also don’t teach you that commercials killed the door-to-door salesman. Commercials were more offensive than an army of Buck Whites. Commercials never leave.
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