The funeral parlor wouldn't be open for almost two hours, but there I was sitting at what looked to be, underneath all those piles of shit, my desk. As I hadn't moved a pile in weeks, and had no intention of moving any that Monday morning, I was making an assumption on either faith or memory, I don't remember which. One thing I do remember was that the first time I'd needed extra chairs, Antonelli, the pasty-faced funeral director, was my savior. But he charged me a dollar per chair, an unexpected expense for our charitable owner, who chewed my ass out.
Of course, getting chewed out by that rotten bastard was neither new nor particularly threatening, it was just that I knew I had only a few of those left in me. I'd told Jim I was nearing the end of my rope with Scully and would either punch his ass out, quit, or both. Jim told me it wasn't Scully the individual as much as it was the frustration I was feeling about my life in general. I decided to think about that.
You learn how difficult it is to watch a clock somewhere around the sixth grade. The old saying about a watched pot never boiling is fine but a watched clock never moving is better. At one minute after nine (I don't know how I got myself to wait that extra minute, it must have been a sign, finally, of the onset of maturation) I punched in Antonelli's Funeral Home phone number. As with many lower middle class areas, Antonelli's Funeral Home was clearly the most beautiful building in the neighborhood. You've got to wonder what it says about a society when in most towns the place where people spend their last few days on earth, albeit very quietly, might have been the nicest place they'd ever stayed in.
Antonelli himself answered the phone. Considering how much money he makes from people too grief stricken to think clearly, you'd think he'd have a full-time receptionist. But he was as consistent as most people and Cosmo Antonelli was cheap AND heartless. His niece wouldn't be in until ten, working until three without a break. Mrs. Antonelli came in around that time and took over the swell duties of answering the phone at a mortuary.
"Good morning Mr. Antonelli, it's Sean Murphy from Scully Sales. How you doin', sir?"
"I'm fine Sean, how many chairs do you need this time?" his voice at once condescending and cloying.
"Just fifteen sir, I can have them back by five o'clock today. Can I send Bobby over to pick them up?"
"I've raised our price Sean. Have your boy bring thirty dollars with him and meet me at the back entrance in twenty minutes."
There was so much awful about Antonelli's words that I remember actually laughing to myself. Our 'boy' was Bobby Warren. He was in his fifties with an IQ of no more than eighty or so but he was as kind a person as I'd ever met and he treated the funeral director with the respect most of us would only lavish on a Pope. Bobby treated everyone like that but Antonelli, having to fake concern for the hardships of his customers all day long treated everyone else as miserably as he could get away with. People like Bobby most surely presented a problem for him, as there would be no limit to what Bobby would let the funeral director say without expressing any emotion. I'm sure Antonelli preferred someone more able to understand just how badly he was being treated, affording him the measure of satisfaction he craved. Beyond all that, my friend the mortician had now raised his rental price from one to two dollars since our last business venture, a sure sign he'd checked with the local rental store which I KNEW was charging three bucks. This sad excuse for a human being was intent on making a few extra bucks on chair rentals as if the money he was making selling overpriced coffins to grieving relatives wasn't enough.
"Yes sir, Bobby will be there in thirty minutes with thirty dollars cash. Thank you very much sir." After explaining to Bobby what I needed him to do I got up and walked over to Jim’s office, knocked on the half open door and walked in. Jim Lohan was sitting with his back turned to the doorway with his feet up on the window sill, smoking what I knew had initially been an nine inch, eight dollar cigar. I'd love to put forth a theory that cigars got more expensive and, especially, longer since we all discovered the novel use our classy president found for his but the timing doesn't work. A pity.
"Big Jim, what's the plan? Bobby's getting the chairs in a little while and I'll have the meeting room set up as soon as he gets back. I called Rev. Hollingsworth last night and that's taken care of. One o'clock they're coming, right?"
Jim Lohan, belly first, swiveled around, took a long pull on his Macanudo and grinned. "Sean my boy, that IS the plan. Sounds to me like You've got it all worked out. The rest is up to me. If I can keep dickhead out of the meeting we'll get the account. Simple as that."
The account Jim spoke of was Randu Hot Sauce. It was another in the overgrown Hot Sauce category. It would pay us about fifty grand a year and with any kind of luck we could keep it in New York metropolitan area supermarkets for at least two years before its movement, or rather lack thereof, would require it dropped by the headquarters of those stores.
As the last remaining small food broker in the New York area we were staying alive by being the final resting-place of items too small to be given any real attention by the big food brokers. But unlike Cosmo Antonelli's customers, ours wouldn't be going out on top. As food brokers go we were bottom of the barrel. On the other hand, they would eventually have one thing very in common with the funeral director's customers and that was they would be dead. And a key responsibility of mine was to keep that fact hidden, at the interview and, hopefully well after we got the account.
Randu, with sales dropping consistently over the last several
years had gone from one big broker to another without any
perceivable diminishment in its decline. Jim ran into their
owner, Harvey Wasserman at a trade dinner and had talked him into
letting us give him a pitch. Today was the day we would show Mr.
Wasserman how Scully Sales would turn Randu around. That's where
the extra chairs and Rev. Hollingsworth came in. The chairs were
for the men from Hollingsworth's shelter to sit in. Randu said
they needed a sales force totaling fifty-five people, and we were
fifteen short.
Questions? Comments? Please send e-mail to jbearden@ieee.org
Material Copyright © 1998-2003 by Jim Bearden