And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas,
when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion
and plunge into the misty deep
and all the gusty winds are raging,
then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea
but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.
Hesiod, Works and Days
A sale is a transference of feeling and energy.
Car sales training manual (paraphrase of Zig Ziglar)
Some people buy cars when they hit mid-life. Me, I decided to sell them. The career move was abrupt. I’d gone to a place called Virtue Flat in eastern Oregon for the total solar eclipse. The creeping darkness into opacity had been impressive. But the return flash of a shard of sun, in the seconds after totality, left me reeling. I drove home with a new life motto: Total Eclipse = Total Reset.
A few days later a banner ad popped up on my screen during my ritual morning perusal of job listings. The largest local car dealership was hiring and was having a job fair the next day. As soon as I saw the pop-up, I knew it was meant to be. The possibility was so outrageous it had to be right.
I’d been trying to exit my stalled career as a professor. I couldn’t eek out a livelihood anymore by cobbling together temporary jobs in far-flung places. If things didn’t pick up soon I’d be working until I was eighty. I crafted yet another cover letter in which I transposed my credentials to another line of work. I re-organized my resume, guessing wildly at what would make an impact. I didn’t think the car world was going to care about my various publications on Plato. So I tried to play up all that great interpersonal experience I’d gained in my decades in the ivory tower. I was hoping they wouldn’t know better. As my fingers flitted across the keys, I realized I was already trying to make my first sale.
I dusted off the red power bag that had never brought me luck at academic job interviews, and vowed this time would be different. The red leather had been lost on the academics; I was banking on the car sales world being more appreciative. As I buffed the leather clean I knew its time had come.
The next day I walked into a hotel lobby for the job fair. I had no idea what to expect. The car dealership was a local institution, with multiple locations and five major car brands. There was a table in the lobby for check-in. A woman from human resources had me sign in and took my resume. She asked which position I was applying for. Sales. Anything. She told me to have a seat and somebody would be with me shortly.
Me and my red bag found a seat by the window. A handful of people sat in the large waiting area. About fifteen minutes later a woman came out from the back area of the hotel. After conferring with the woman at the front table she called my name. We shook hands. She escorted me back into the convention section of the hotel. We entered a banquet-style room set up with the same kind of curtained interview cubicles I’d frequented at academic conferences, where I’d won and lost a thousand battles I hadn’t even known I was fighting. I wasn’t sure if the similarity was eerie or auspicious. At least my red bag felt at home.
I was immediately impressed by the woman interviewing me. She was one of the senior finance managers in the company. They’re the people you deal with in the last phase of car-buying, where you negotiate the logistics of how you’ll pay for your new wheels and they try to sell you myriad add-ons. I had no idea how to present myself for this kind of field. All I could do was be myself. I had nothing to lose, or so I thought. I let the hum of Total Reset guide my answers and interview vibe.
I walked out of the curtained cubicle with a job, sort of. She wanted me to start their week-long training program the next day. They’d teach us how to sell cars and would evaluate which car brand we’d be most suited to sell. The week-long training gave them an out if they didn’t like what they saw; it would give me an out for the same reasons. Reciprocal window-shopping and tire kicking. In retrospect, I realized it was their way of creating a captive audience to sell me on a profession that was universally denigrated. Or at least viewed with suspicion. It would be both training program and sales pitch. In the wake of the eclipse, it didn’t really matter. I was poised to buy what they were selling.
When I walked out of the hotel, I was amazed, once again, at how fast a life can change.
The prospect of selling cars struck a chord with the inner vestiges of my punk rock heart. But it was still a weird move. Part of me noticed I was rolling along with something totally incongruous with ease and unthinking speed. But a deeper part of me didn’t care, and was the source of the ride I’d jumped on. After a decade of jumping through hoops in the academic world, without reaping much long-term benefit, my patience with being overqualified and underpaid had been tapped out. I figured I might as well try out the reverse: being underqualified and overpaid.
******************
The next morning, red bag in tow, I went to the Chevy dealership where we’d begin the training. We started with nine people in the group. The first order of business was passing the required drug test. We took turns ducking out to the bathroom with the woman in charge of the testing. The last time I’d had a urine sample collected the results had been life-altering. I’d found out I’d gotten pregnant during a rousing night with tequila, long after having given up on procreation due to my age and a fruitless eight-month foray in the world of IVF. I’d lost the pregnancy a few months earlier, back before the total eclipse and its shadow darkness. Back before the bling of the sun’s sudden return gave me Total Eclipse = Total Reset.
This time with the urine sample I knew what the results would be–no surprises there. Which wasn’t to say there wouldn’t be life-altering things set in motion by the collection. As I handed the cup with my clean specimen to the woman, I knew I was done doing the right thing.
It had led me nowhere lasting. If ephemerality was the way of things, I might as well make bank.
Our training group was like one of those Chevy commercials where a demographically stratified group of “actual customers” watches a series of vehicles become unveiled as an emcee narrates the litany of awards each car has won. Our group was like that—a nearly too perfect mix of ages, sizes, genders, races, and styles. I wondered for a moment if the whole thing was an elaborate set-up for such a commercial. Exciting! I was quickly informed this was not the case.
With drug tests and introductions out of the way, we got down to business. In front of each of us was a huge binder emblazoned with Salespath on the cover. It weighed several pounds and was a few inches thick. We’d be learning—and tested on—the entirety of its contents over the course of the week. They weren’t messing around. Which, for me, was supremely enticing. I liked being given specific things to master, and academia had trained me well in that regard. That Salespath had a text sealed the deal. I would study the crap out of that binder and put my decades of great books curricula to use.
Along with the Salespath tutorials they’d do various exercises and role playing in order to evaluate us. At the end of the training period the managers would put in requests to upper management about who they wanted to add to their sales team. On the last day there’d be a big reveal of which dealership—and therefore car brand—we’d been matched with. They were vague and somewhat mysterious about how that would be determined, and wouldn’t say a lot about the stakes of those assignments. That part was not enticing. I find it intolerable to be in circumstances where others know more about my life than I do.
Our instructors the first day were senior sales managers from Chevy and Mazda, Beau and Gene. They got us started on the ten-step Salespath method of car-selling. But it became immediately apparent they’d be doing a whole lot more. The Salespath method, while important, was merely the visible layer of a broader philosophy underpinning the whole endeavor. That was when things got intriguing. Turns out the car sales world, at least for those in management, who have risen there through long-term sales success, is premised on a central pillar of positivity and relentless self-improvement. At the heart of car sales was a moral orientation to possibility. When that became apparent on the first morning of training, I wondered if my stint as a professor of philosophy and ethics would turn out to have a lucrative second wind after all.
For anyone in sales, or familiar with emblematic figures like Dale Carnegie or Zig Ziglar, the moral undertow will come as no surprise. But for me it was. As the week progressed, and I met central players at the dealerships, I was blown away by the resonance between their view of the world and the kind of stuff you’d hear at a yoga or self-help retreat, my more typical environs. The gist: You are responsible for co-creating the world in which you live. You manifest the relationships and circumstances in which you find yourself, based on the quality of your vision and commitment to enactment. Focused attention and relentless dedication precipitate rewarding outcomes and opportunities. Positive attitude is the well that keeps on giving, generating limitless abundance. And, as best summed up by my favorite quote from the week: “A sale is a transference of feeling and energy.” Who hasn’t heard some version of that at a yoga class? There was a racket going on in each of these worlds. And I was catching on to it. But I was also sort of hooked.
In our first day, Beau and Gene peeled back the curtain a bit onto this interior view. Beau shared his story of how he’d developed his career with the dealership over the past fifteen years. He kept returning to an emphasis upon positive attitude and the removal of negative distractions from your habits and routines. He was a complaint-free man, which I’m a sucker for. Without boasting, and with genuine enthusiasm, he described how he set goals for himself and posted them around his house for frequent viewing. He asked us to share how we set our goals and what steps we took to ensure their achievement. He ended his session with a salvo he’d clearly used before: Reading and distributing a one-page manifesto about attitude that he’d consulted throughout his career. He beamed with confidence and vitality. For me, it was catnip.
Gene’s role was to introduce us to the first step of Salespath, the all-important “Meet and Greet.” He identified it as the crux of the whole process. If you blew the first impression with a customer, the whole thing was over before it even got started. Since people are entrained to be wary, suspicious, and fearful of car salesmen you had to dispel all that psychological baggage in the first minutes of meeting someone. Until you could get them to trust you, you weren’t going to sell them squat.
We did a lot of role playing that week. Gene got us started by having us develop our version of the meet and greet. He’d pretend to be a customer and evaluate us, offering feedback. It was awkward and hilarious all at once. And, in some way, deeply humane. Shouldn’t greeting people with warmth and rapport be something we practice how to do way back in high school? We were only a few hours into the training and I’d already received more instruction about generally applicable skills than I ever had as a college professor, where job training and career development had been basically non-existent. I figured that no matter where the week went, the first day had delivered.
The next day we went to Honda, where the sessions focused on the all-important “Walk Around”–i.e. the product demonstration done on the car lot where you get your chance to shine for the customer and show them you know your stuff. Within the industry they are a point of pride and competition. Literally: a circuit of nationwide contests for walk-arounds gives car salesmen yet another opportunity to make money, just by pretending to sell cars. Now that’s a profession committed to its craft. The manager at Honda told us he’d won $8000 competing on the circuit. Cha-ching!
The highlight of the week was developing a walk-around and getting videotaped so we could see ourselves on film. I’d been assigned a Mercedes S-Class Sedan. Internally I winced when I’d first heard the straw I’d drawn. I didn’t see how I could sell such a superfluously luxurious vehicle and keep a straight face. But once I decided to throw caution to the wind and fake my best capitalist moxie, I let the cameras eat it up. The manager asked me if I’d been a model, which he meant to be flattering, but made me feel like I’d sold my soul before I’d even met a real customer. And then I remembered: Total Eclipse = Total Reset. If I was going to be a car salesman, there’d be no glossing over the Total.
The tone throughout the training sessions was professional intensity with a dose of good humor. They were trying to give us a sense of the mixed vibe of car sales—fleeting levity amidst the grueling realities of the schedule, the poor reputation of car salesmen, and the high frequency of failure. Their favorite point of comparison was with baseball: You had to get used to a whole lot of failed at-bats for every run scored. If you couldn’t handle hearing “No” a lot, communicated in a variety of colorful ways, then you probably weren’t going to get very far in the profession. And you had to get on board with the long hours required. Car salesmen work late and they work every weekend, all weekend. Your life as you’ve known it pretty much ends.
The carrot they kept dangling in order to balance out all the sacrifice and bummer details was the money. They’d be both explicit and withholding about this crucial aspect. There was no extended boasting, or long elaborations about the financial side of it all. But there were emphatic assertions about the limitless amount of cash you could make if you put in the work required. One manager actually said, verbatim, as a point of fact: “You have the opportunity to make more money than you ever dreamed possible.”
When these kinds of statements arose, I’d strain to keep from raising my eyebrows and would ponder the implausibility of it all. There were a few of us in the group who were older, who’d had other careers and were slower to drink the Kool Aid on offer. Randy had had a successful career selling farm equipment to large-scale operations in the agricultural hub of our region. He’d been laid off in the recession and was trying to forge a last reboot of his career before retirement. Mike had been a regional manager for Circle K. He’d also been laid off in the recession and was tired of spending all his downtime crocheting, a hobby he enjoyed but not as his main gig. Whenever the instructors floated a grandiose claim during the training we’d confer during our breaks about how to assess them with some realism, and no background context.
The three of us were on the fence about it all, and our instructors weren’t breaking down their key claims with evidence. What percentage of their sales staff was making the big bucks they kept referring to? How long did it take to get there? How many people just skated by? One man in our group, Tony, had actually been in car sales for thirteen years. He bore some telltale signs, like he had to pound an energy drink and smoke every hour on the hour. He’d moved up to Washington from California. Even though he was experienced, the dealership was still making him go through the training. That was how seriously they took Salespath.
Tony had been extremely helpful all week. He had amazing eyelashes that abetted his attempts to hide under the radar, and go humbly unnoticed. When we asked him about the veracity of all the big money hoopla he confirmed what they said was indeed possibly true. But a lot hinged on which dealership you were at. And, how far you were willing to go to develop your craft as a salesman. He’d done his homework and determined that Subaru was the place to be. So amongst our training pod, across the week, a certain amount of spoken and unspoken anxiety arose about who would go where, and why, and to what ends. We were rooting for each other, and yet we were in competition with each other. Welcome to the world of car sales!
Everyone who knew I was in the training wanted to know about Salespath. Were there secrets to the process of car sales that, if you knew them, would give you some leverage when purchasing a car? Insider know-how that would help you avoid getting scammed? Here’s the thing: The more I learned about Salespath, the more I came to see it as one particular language—one distinct way of framing—something all humans engage in, all the time, in a majority of our relationships. We want to create connection with others. We want momentum to flow from this connection towards some shared end. We want each person to be fully involved in the experience, adapting as circumstances warrant in order to reach a point where the connection becomes solidified around a decision, a shared act. And we want each person to emerge from the experience with something they need or desire, in a way that leaves everyone feeling satisfied and good. It’s not a mere transaction, nor is it a robust relationship. It is something in between. And isn’t that where we live most of our public lives with others? Salespath was just a ten-step portrait of that shared space.
We did of course learn general strategies for how to navigate the potentially sticky negotiation portion of a car sale. But, even then, there were no rabbits being pulled out of hats, no secret practices or industry cover-ups. We were basically learning how to talk with people, and hear them, in order to get something done that involved money. People can come to agreements over money, or they can become alienated from one another over it. There are professional and unprofessional ways of doing both. For better and worse that situation is all over the human world in all kinds of forms. Car sales just happens to be where it becomes crystallized and exposed in a very particular and memorable way. I didn’t totally buy it, but I did find it refreshing to encounter a world in which a lot of effort had been made to articulate the dynamics of human interaction at the core of their business. It may have been flawed, but it was almost without pretense, and I found it to be honest. And that’s typically not the first word that comes to mind when someone says to you: “Car Salesman.”
By far the star of the show was John, the general manager of the Subaru and Mercedes dealerships. Which made him a kind of VP of the whole 5-dealership shebang. He was electrified by his profession and impassioned to share that electricity with anyone daring to enter his orbit. After a few sessions with us he threw the Salespath manual out the window, literally, and taught us instead by story, example, and instinct. He was a brilliant chip cut straight from the Salesman archetype block. All cylinders operating all the time, with unflagging commitment to being a professional salesman, even though his current position was more of a corporate, upper-management nature. His energy, focus, and acumen were impressive. His good-natured vibe and ability to laugh made it believable. I enjoy seeing anyone at the top of their game and that was certainly where he appeared to reside 24/7.
John was a big fan of sharing wisdom and nuggets from legends in the literary culture of the sales world. We had a list of recommended reading in our manual, which he drew upon heavily, the one part of the manual he seemed to genuinely respect. Entries included: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino, On Being a Real Person by Fosdick, and, of course, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. If you’ve never dipped into the writings by classic and contemporary cult figures in the sales world, I highly recommend it. Whether you agree or disagree with their philosophies, I guarantee an eye-opening experience.
For the last of our sessions with John he’d held in reserve his favorite short essay from that literary culture. Its author boiled down success in sales to 3 things: 1) You had to decide, really decide, that you wanted to be a sales professional. 2) You had to commit every aspect of your life for the next six months to learning how to be a sales professional. 3) You had to give up TV for those six months. Which John updated to include: All Social Media. I think the point was to emphasize the focus and sacrifice required. You had to be all-in and you had to cut away distractions and energy sucks. The essay was simply written, and direct. John told us its truth and power would not be immediately apparent to us. That we might endorse parts of it, but skimp on others. He urged us to take it seriously and trust those three pillars like our careers—and our lives—depended on them. He stated with utter conviction that after several decades he could attest to the accuracy of those pillars in predicting sales success.
I listened, and believed I’d heard him. But it wouldn’t sink in for a couple months, when I’d have to figure out where I really wanted to stake those pillars in my life. In the meantime, about fifteen hours later, we’d all gather for the big reveal, when they’d tell us which dealership we’d been assigned to for the next leg of our journey.
**********************
That night, over dinner, my husband asked me what I wanted to happen. He’d been supportive during the training program but a bit removed from it all, trying to take in the paradigm shift required. He could see that when I had said Total Eclipse = Total Reset I wasn’t kidding. He didn’t want to rain on that parade but seemed either speechless or unconcerned about the car sales development. I could see his gears turning, but he’d kept pretty mum about the whole thing. When I got enthused about something it could be hard to interject dissent into the renegade momentum propelling me onward. But the fact of the matter was that I yearned for the interjection. I wanted someone, preferably my husband, to see me, to acknowledge the momentum while also saying my choice was askew. My whole life people close to me had left me alone. Maybe because I could hold an outsize space. Probably because I exuded the solitary vibe of woman-on-a-mission. Both of which probably meant I’d crush it in car sales.
We talked about what the job would entail. How things like dinner together—our primary ritual of daily connection—would be lost to the schedule the sales position required. Ditto for weekends and vacations. But if the financial benefits turned out to be similar to what had been indicated, it would allow me to make a robust income for the first time in my life. If I wanted to retire at a reasonable age, if we wanted to get out of the month-to-month money game that academia and life events had left us within, then appropriately serious measures were required. I could do the work for a few years and then get out. Aside from the pragmatic reasons, I also thought I could be great at the work and would relish the dynamism of the job. I thrived on intensity and that would clearly not be in short supply.
We sat at the large wooden table that had centered our relationship from the beginning. I told him if I got matched with Subaru or Chevy I’d go for it. I knew I couldn’t pull off selling Mercedes, of having to become well-versed and comfortable with the wealth the brand dripped in. I was worried they’d place me there because I was female, because I’d aced my walk-around, and because they might think my professorial background could parlay into that market. I didn’t want to work at Mazda because I found the cars ugly and I’m not that good at sustaining a lie. I knew I wouldn’t get placed at Honda, because they had zero women working on the showroom floor. Over there it was explicitly and brazenly a boys-only club.
I drove a Chevy truck and my fantasy car was a Camaro, so I thought I could make that brand work. The sweet spot seemed to be Subaru. The reputation of the car offset the reputation of car salesmen. Their brand motto: “Love, it’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru.” You’re not going to get much more touchy-feely than that in the car world. I also knew it was the fastest growing car brand in the Pacific Northwest, which boosted the financial odds of the gamble’s pay-off. But the team and management there were young. There’d been some red flags there during the training, and it was hard to know what to make of them. But on balance, it seemed the best-case scenario.
The additional X-factor was that I could be a sucker for serendipitous reappearances. My first car had been a Subaru. It had had a storied life and been the only witness to every high and low of my late-twenties into my early forties. It had taken me on every road trip, helped me move into every new vista for fifteen years. Palo Alto, Oakland, Bishop, Los Angeles, Reno, Sebastopol, Pueblo, and every place in between. All the key locales in my life had had that Subaru’s wheels roll through them. It had been privy to every vagary, delight, and demise of all the romantic dalliances I’d had before getting married. My all-time greatest love shenanigans and heartbreak lows had transpired in that car or its vicinity. The last man I’d loved before I got married, who broke my heart, had driven a Crosstrek. There was no shortage of history with me and Subaru.
But I’d also had to put quite a pretty penny into my Subaru due to the major repairs it had needed as it advanced in age. I’d sunk thousands of dollars into it in its twilight years. Suffice it to say I wasn’t totally sold on the dependability mantra by which they had expected us to sing Subaru’s praises during the training. Somewhere deep inside of me I think I saw the chance to sell Subarus—and to make oodles of money off them in the process—as a way to get even and offload all my historical baggage with the brand.
My mixed feelings got swayed by an absurd detail I thought was charming enough to indicate I should hang my hopes on the car brand. “Subaru” is the Japanese name for the Pleiades constellation. Its logo depicts the star formation. It was also an homage to the original cluster of companies constituting the parent company, in unity, which was another translation of Subaru.
I’d grown tired of the rhetoric of unity in the country’s disastrous political climate. So that had no hold on me. But the Pleiades bit was just enough to tilt the scales away from my dubiousness into the territory of “You know, maybe this could all work out.” What kind of world do we live in such that one moment I could be in the Oregon desert gazing up at the Pleiades the night before a total solar eclipse, and then, a few weeks later, spend my days in the capitalist rabbit hole of car sales, peddling a stylistically challenged auto brand bedecked with the same constellation? What to make of a world in which a group of nymphs from Greek mythology—the female companions of Artemis, goddess of the wilderness—were now immortalized by a metal icon emblazoned on a steel moving object that was largely responsible for destroying the global climate in which nature once thrived? There was too much synchronicity to let go to waste. But I’d have to sleep on it a night before hearing the next morning what the car gods had determined. My career escapade was in their hands.
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The car gods fell for the Pleaides synchronicity too. It lasted a couple of months, about as long as my shock pregnancy. I became a Subaru-Certified Sales and Leasing Agent. As with the shock pregnancy, the experience was a mini-odyssey I couldn’t quite bring myself to regret because the soul exposure was so priceless. My trimester in car sales was a slow-burn whirlwind of recognition, reckoning, and surprise.
The first couple of weeks went by quickly. I had to complete a ton of online training through Subaru in order to explain their vehicles to customers. So initially the long hours and car-lot confinement of selling cars was awash in the dutiful activity of completing online modules and passing certification quizzes. After a lifetime of quizzes and tests that was one thing I could blow through with ease. Boxer Engine tutorial? Check. CVT Transmission and Symmetrical All-Wheel-Drive? Check. Eyesight® Comprehensive Safety Technology? Got it. Outback? Forester? Legacy? I could give a blow by blow, feature by feature account of how they all merited their reputation and price tag.
Along with the product tutorials I had to learn the Salespath method in a Subaru-specific way. This meant a lot of practice on the lot with different cars. Some hours I’d shadow my mentor, Jake, to learn how to create a relational experience with a customer and sell them a car at the same time. Other hours I’d practice alone with a vehicle in front of me, the hood popped up and doors flung open as I practiced my pitch.
Once I’d mastered product know-how, I moved on to the test drive and the Salespath steps for negotiation. As with many other sales environments, they followed a pyramid model when depicting the ideal interaction with customers: Spend a lot of time at the base establishing rapport. Build trust and explain value as you educate the customer about the vehicle. Fold it all within a personalized, visceral experience with the car. And funnel all that practical and psychological leg work into the tippy-top of the pyramid—the actual discussion and agreement upon financial terms—where you want to spend as little time as possible. The pyramid made perfect sense. But all of it was merely theoretical until you were working with actual customers. That kicked in after a couple weeks, once they felt comfortable letting me loose on the lot, with Jake looped in as back-up. I’d have to demonstrate my prowess before I could operate on my own. They had that fine reputation of car salesmen to uphold, after all.
Once I began interacting with customers a few things became immediately apparent. Some of them were potentially derailing and some of them were promising. A first glaring hiccup involved something that should have been obvious. But I hadn’t recognized it until I was in the situation. This involved the test drive. I’d practiced a ton on my own, making sure I knew a few routes and could narrate all kinds of vehicle features while retaining control of the car. But, in an actual test drive I wasn’t doing the driving – the customer was. Which meant that multiple times a day you entrusted your life to a total stranger who was operating a motor vehicle they know nothing about. I could barely stand being a passenger when my husband was driving.
The first time a customer pulled out of the dealership lot with me riding shotgun, we had to perch at a left-hand turn that would cut across busy traffic. I instinctively held my breath. “Shit” I voiced internally, “How had I failed to register this inescapable element of car sales?!?” It had fallen between the lines of the Salespath manual. As with so many things in car sales, you had a choice: The thing that pricked you somewhere inside could either signal your doom in the profession, or, it could be the source of your flourishing. In the case of the test drive, I was able to hijack my hang-up and convert it into a strength. I made the test drive my forte. I could get people squealing with delight before they bothered to ask about adaptive cruise control. “That’s exciting!” goes a long way toward making someone feel the fun of a new car. Though it’s at the expense of reminding them they really want to keep their wits about them if they don’t actually want to drive home with a new vehicle.
It’s not too much to say that the test drive is a vortex of suspended control in the car sales situation. On the one hand, the car salesman has handed literal control of the vehicle over to the customer. On the other hand, the car salesman remains in control of the process whereby the customer can shift from acting like the car is theirs to the car actually being theirs. It’s an intriguing psychological situation. And, at some level, totally fucked up. Can you imagine any other setting in which people willingly, and sometimes gladly, leap into strange vehicles worth tens of thousands of dollars, to fly down the highway at 70mph, with people they don’t know and probably don’t trust? It was a microcosm of both the humane folly and hopefulness spurring the car market onward.
The other thing I hadn’t counted on also became a hidden strength: no one suspected I was in car sales. Because I didn’t give off a seller’s vibe, and, at first glance, no one thought I worked there, I could establish conversation with unsuspecting people before they remembered they were supposed to be wary of car salesmen. I’d be out on the lot, perusing our inventory and practicing my pitch, when an unsuspecting person who’d snuck onto the lot, trying to look at vehicles without drawing the attention of anyone, would come across me and assume I was doing the same thing. Often when I told them I worked there they’d be taken aback. That moment of disconnect would create an opening for me, and cause them to forget momentarily the stereotype of the pushy person they feared they’d encounter. For this reason, I assiduously avoided wearing the color combo or logo’d jacket that other people on the sales team wore. I figured if I could remain incognito for even a few key moments then I’d have a better shot at disarming the defensive tactics customers came armed with.
But that usually lasted about a minute, and was hard to parlay into success. Have you ever worked in a situation where 90% of people looked at you with a base level of distrust from the get-go? It’s a visceral experience, and uncannily paired with the abandon required by the test drive. People would literally be trying to run away from me and then fifteen minutes later would want to hop into a car with me. It required a lot of interpersonal dexterity to navigate the dynamics involved. You also had to be rock solid in your own estimation of yourself and be truly oblivious to other peoples’ opinions of you. I’d find out shortly that, in these respects, I was both impenetrable and vulnerable at the same time, a combination difficult to pull off in the wilds of Salespath over the long haul.
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The social fact of female mobility presented Greek society with a set of tactical and moral problems that it never quite solved but which it sought to clarify, during the archaic and classical periods, by recourse to pollution beliefs and the code of conduct governing miasmata (defilements) in general. To isolate and insulate the female, from society and from itself, was demonstrably the strategy informing many of the notions, conventions and rituals that surrounded female life in the ancient world. I will examine this strategy for its logic and its practice by asking, first, what the ancients meant by ‘dirt’ and why they disliked it; second, what they did with their dirt and their dislike. It will not be possible, for the most part, to distinguish physical from metaphysical, nor concept from cause. But if we look closely at the dilemma posed by female dirt, we will begin to see the outlines of an ideology of powerful effect.
Anne Carson, “Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity”
They say you never forget your first car sale. I can attest to the truth of that statement, though my reasons for agreement aren’t likely the ones they had in mind. It happened a few weeks into my job at Subaru, during one of the dealership’s car extravaganzas where all five car brands were relocated to a giant field in a public park. The fall event was called Oktoberfest. Acres of cars in one place, with a big circus tent at the entrance. Several dozen sales agents patrolled the entire inventory with free rein to sell any car, of any make, and any model. It was the car sales equivalent of Country Buffet – a cornucopia of product at one’s fingertips with express permission given to reap the bounty as much as one could. In order to graduate from my training period with the dealership–and become a full, commission-based sales agent–I had to score a sale, and demonstrate I could get a deal done. I was counting on Oktoberfest to lead me to the promised land.
Inside the tent, one half of the space was devoted to make-shift offices for the sales and finance managers who ran the whole operation. The other half of the tent was full of banquet tables where deals got hammered out between sales agents and customers. At the entrance was a welcome foyer where drinks and snacks from Costco were set out. In one corner a local DJ had set up his gear for the week, broadcasting from the event, hyping up the tremendous deals to be had. The tent was a hive of activity and—since air-blown heat was being pumped into the tent to offset the dropping autumn temps—a sauna-like hive. Over the next 7 days, from 9 to 9 every day, the tent would be witness to hundreds of deals, host to a replenishing cascade of all the human emotions at play when money and cars are involved. It was not something to be trifled with. My co-workers had been building it up for weeks.
I had adopted a uniform for the week, mostly in response to the long hours and hundreds of miles we’d log in foot traffic as we covered the acreage on the hunt for customers. Out of about fifty sales agents on duty, around ten of us were female. We worked either at Subaru or Mercedes, the only dealerships who had crossed the gender threshold. Most of the female sales agents wore little purses across their bodies in order to carry all the things you needed throughout the day. I knew that would be a recipe for a screaming lower back so I took advantage of the fact that I worked for Subaru. I had a little red backpack designed to carry a water bladder for hiking or running. I took out the water bladder and stuffed in all the essentials I’d need during the week. Water bottle, business cards, and the electronic gizmo that let me open up any vehicle for sale. It wasn’t the norm and probably most everyone thought I was a weirdo. The one exception was Nelson, our finance manager, an amazing guy known for his colorful suits. He’d give me the thumbs up and an enthusiastic shout out any time he saw me that week. I knew I was drawing looks, but didn’t care. The average customer wandering around the acres of vehicles would presume I was just another customer and I’d try to capitalize on the element of surprise. By the end of the week I actually had customers return to the event and request me by referencing me as “the woman with the little red backpack.” Way more effective than a business card that got thrown away ten minutes later.
I went into the week knowing it would be taxing, but was excited. By that point I’d begun to get a read of the landscape at Subaru, which had generated both high hopes and big questions. I figured Oktoberfest would be telling. After the first day, a lot more writing was on the wall. Oktoberfest meant walking for twelve hours a day around a sea of motor vehicles, targeting customers from afar, and then walking up to them with faux spontaneous ease. Certain times of day, and some days of the week, we had enough people exploring the inventory so that the hours got filled with customer interactions. But there were also large portions of a day when the event was pretty dead. I’d pass the hours by strolling endlessly through the lines of cars, trying to invent stories for vehicles about who they’d be good matches for. Since I was not constrained to sell only Subaru at the event, and would potentially have to help customers with any make or model in the whole shebang, it was a daunting amount of car territory to cover for a newbie. I didn’t know a lot about cars generally, and am a bad liar, so I’d have to wing it in other ways. My solution was to create narratives for vehicles. My favorite one during the week was for a Jeep I dubbed “Willy’s Wild Ride.”
The Jeep was used, and bright yellow. It was huge and had a raised suspension with super badass, Mars-worthy all-terrain tires. It said “Willy’s” in bold black letters on each side of the vehicle, an adornment that was part of the sports package with which the Jeep had been equipped. The name was an insider’s gesture to the history of the Jeep brand. Willy’s Overland Motors was one of the car companies that developed a four-wheel drive vehicle for the U.S. Army in World War II. When I learned that tidbit from my husband, I knew I had my vehicle’s story and made it my personal goal to sell that sucker before Oktoberfest was done.
The hardtop and interior of the Jeep were all black, with motifs of tire tracks decorating all the floor mats. For reasons I could never determine, “Wild Boar” was imprinted on the handles and grips stationed throughout the inside so you could hold on while you were off-roading or doing tricks off the grid. It had an amazing sound system, with weather-proof speakers posted right under the center roll bar and an extra one lodged in the floor of the back storage compartment. It being a Jeep, the roof was designed to come off so you could get your rocks off with that amazing sound system while gallivanting in the open air. Aside from the Cadillac Escalade that cost $80,000 it had my vote for most ridiculous vehicle on the Oktoberfest lot. But, unlike the Escalade, it was also a lot of fun and made for a great test drive experience. A few days in I tried to get management to help out with my scheme of hosting a luau in front of Willy’s Wild Ride. We’d roast a boar on a spit in order to draw customers into the lair. While they appreciated my creative entrepreneurship, I was told that plan was pretty much not gonna happen. I was left to dream on. But heck if I didn’t test drive the shit out of that Jeep the whole week. One mention of “4×4 that isn’t a Subaru and we don’t care about fuel economy” and I was off and running.
I’d like to report that my first car sale was Willy’s Wild Ride, but I can’t. That honor goes to a used 2016 white Crosstrek—yes, Crosstrek! Ahh, the car karma!—that I sold to a guy about my age. I almost didn’t casually saunter over to help him when I first saw him. He had been savvy. Instead of entering Oktoberfest through the front entrance he had parked in back of the whole party and surreptitiously made his way to the Subarus without detection. I saw him from about forty yards away, not a salesman in sight. Bingo! But then I spotted Martine, a colleague on my team, who was fantastic, begin to swoop over. He was about halfway to the customer when he got a phone call. He motioned for me to step in and take his place. I scooted over, trying to look casual, and approached the man trying to stay under the radar.
I introduced myself as a Subaru specialist. A sliver of surprise disarmed him momentarily. In a split second of scanning me over, I could tell he was trying to place my little red hiker’s backpack and overall look into the car sales category, and assess his odds. His game face brightened and he relaxed just enough for us to start talking. He started his vehicle story. I listened for the thread of desire within it that would lead me to the holy grail: The car that would fit his parameters just enough, and, the crux logistical or financial factor that, if matched, would deliver his assent into my hands. Game on!
He had a very specific matrix of factors already deduced and computed, a trait not uncommon in Subaru buyers. They tend to be long on independent research and short on interpersonal or pricing B.S. I knew right away that in one sense he could be an easy sale and in another sense a difficult one. He knew his criteria very specifically—if I could fulfill them I’d have a sale and if I couldn’t then I would not. He also announced a few minutes in that he had a quote from our main competitor in Spokane. If we couldn’t get him what he wanted then he’d just drive up there and buy elsewhere. He wasn’t pulling attitude about it, he was just transparent with his situation, and signaling he wasn’t a novice buyer. My novice selling skills were on high alert.
Because I’d patrolled the inventory until I thought I’d lose my mind, I knew precisely which two vehicles we had that matched his stated needs. As I walked him over to the used inventory, it became evident that while he was laser-focused on what he wanted, he also had a wandering eye. His eyes roved over the sea of vehicles, scoping out not-to-be-passed-up deals. He’d be with me, then dart off to check something out, saying he’d meet me at the used Crosstrek in a minute. As anyone in car sale knows, people come up with 1001 ways to leave you on the lot. Every time his wandering eye drew him elsewhere, I presumed I’d never see him again. Then, a couple of minutes later, he’d pop back up just where he’d said he’d meet me. Whatever Ford Explorer or Nissan Pathfinder he’d stopped to check out hadn’t held his interest. Eventually we got to the car I had in mind. I opened it up, pulled it forward on the grass, and showed him I knew what I was talking about. He agreed it fit all his criteria, which meant: Test Drive Is On! I had to drive up to the tent to get a license plate, a short jaunt that typically the customer did with you, catching a ride in the car. But he wanted to walk up there and meet me, claiming he wanted to look at other inventory along the way. I drove up to the tent to get the plate, once again presuming he’d used the ruse to leave me high and dry. But when I came out of the tent, fake plates in hand, he was there! The taste of the sale came to my lips. I tried to settle my nerves so I wouldn’t fuck it up.
I had to drive the vehicle off the park grass, as per company policy, to a little parking lot about fifty yards away, at which point the customer could take the wheel. Here too, he said he’d meet me over there. I figured that surely this time he was giving me the slip. But he didn’t. I parked the car, moved to the passenger side, and he got in behind the wheel. Finally, we were off!
The first few minutes proceeded normally, but at the point where I directed him to exit the highway and turn right, to head back into the park, he promptly exited the highway and turned left, into the city. A little wave of “Oh shit, what is he doing?!” fluttered up in me. I realized no one really knew I’d taken this guy out for a test drive. To make matters worse, when he took that renegade left turn, he’d also cut the turn a little too short and headed us into oncoming traffic. I let out a minor exclamation. He quickly course-corrected, apologizing for the mistake. As we made our way up the street he looked over at me. Everything hung in the balance of that look. The dynamics of a potential sale electrified the air. But because each of us was trying to play it cool we let the zing dissipate into the roomy back seats of the Crosstrek.
Then the moment transmuted into one of those minute occasions where people slip from being strangers to being, not friends, but at least more familiar co-inhabitants of humanity. He made a little joke about how he’d seen me grab the side of the door even though I’d tried to be discrete about it, when he’d almost turned into traffic. He made the joke in a way that didn’t convert the situation into a power play, but established his recognition of my vulnerability and his mistake. It was the kind of fleeting relational blip where two people release their grip on things just enough to let themselves have a little fun with the absurdity of it all.
We drove around for about twenty minutes, taking a circuitous route back to Oktoberfest. In the course of the drive we talked about the vehicle, but also about a wide range of other life stuff. Somehow in a way that wasn’t off-putting or creepy I learned by the end of the drive that he’d had an unexpected fourth child due to a vasectomy which hadn’t done what it was supposed to do. I withheld my own tale of recent fertility failure. I wanted the sale, badly, but I wasn’t about to trade on my private anguish. As a novice, some things still remained sacred.
During the drive he also mentioned he’d bought several other vehicles through our company before, and liked doing business with us. He had an older son who had recently purchased a car with a Honda salesman I’d met earlier that week. I took all of that info to be good signals of sales success because it meant he was familiar with how we did business. Another good sign was that he kept asking how much an extended warranty would cost. It was beyond my authority to answer–that question fell squarely within the finance managers’ racket–but was a good indication he was serious about buying and wouldn’t be super cheap about it.
We finished the drive and assessed where he was at. He’d noticed a few things on the drive that weren’t ideal; he also was unsure about the vehicle’s high mileage. I suggested we compare it with the 2016 model. The more recent model year would have dramatically less mileage and the cost increase wasn’t proportionately higher. It also came with a more robust warranty. He said that sounded like a fair plan. Which was all fine, except it meant navigating another round of the hide and seek, cat and mouse, car-buyer’s ADD again.
I left our first car candidate outside the tent and took the keys so that no one else could sell it in case the guy changed his mind. I told him we’d meet at the other used Crosstrek back on the grass lot. If ever he had an easy time to slip away it would be then. At least five minutes without me there to hold the reins of the process. Defying the odds once again, when I arrived at the other vehicle he was there, wandering around and inspecting the Monroney stickers of nearby cars. Then things got a little comical. He said he wanted to look at the cars and would meet me in the parking lot once I’d driven the car off the grass and was ready to go. There wasn’t much I could do except go with the flow of his wandering eye. I opened the 2016 Crosstrek and hopped in. But, I grabbed the keys from the 2014 model by accident and stuck them in the ignition instead. One of Subaru’s manifold safety and security features is a theft-proof ignition. When I inserted the wrong key the steering wheel locked up and wouldn’t budge. Because I was a bit hopped up about the impending sale and was in a hurry, I became flustered and couldn’t see the mistake I’d made. All I could see was that the steering wheel had locked, and the car wasn’t going anywhere. I felt the sale slipping through my fingers as I clutched the immobile steering wheel.
After a couple minutes of flailing, one of my Subaru teammates walked by and I flagged her over. She couldn’t figure it out either. We spotted Raul, another Subaru coworker, and called him over. He had the hugest, kindest eyes I’d probably ever seen and was a fantastic salesman. He guessed pretty quickly what had happened. He exclaimed a subtle but potent, kind but exasperated, “Jeez, Jenn” as he pointed out the problem. I apologized profusely and thanked him for his troubles as I hopped back in and made a mad dash to the meet-up point, hoping I hadn’t just squandered away my hot prospect. Somehow, the guy was still there, saying he’d wondered what had happened to me. I couldn’t believe it. If he was still in the game, then this was my sale to lose.
We took the newer model out for a much shorter spin, with no renegade turns or hijinx. By the end of the second test drive, as we pulled into the parking lot, I’d secured his verbal commitment that he’d buy the car if we could find payment terms agreeable to him. The commitment is all-important. No commitment = No next steps of Salespath. Which was really a much bigger theory of life embedded into a profane sales method. If you take nothing else from the world of car sales, take at least that golden nugget.
Once the commitment was in place, the rest of the process shifted into the logistics of the negotiation and the sale. The first thing we had to do was get the vehicle he wanted to trade in and bring it to the front of the tent where it would be evaluated. As we made our way to his car, the Honda salesman he’d worked with previously drove by in a truck and stopped to say hi. They chatted briefly as I looked on.
I’d met the other salesman a few days before over one of the badly catered meals the dealership provided. I’d asked him the same two questions I asked every salesman I met that week: “What do you like most about car sales?” and “What is the one piece of advice that someone new to car sales most needs to know?” His answer to the first question had been, “The money.” Which was what everybody—except one—had said all week. His piece of advice was to never let any one customer dictate your paycheck or your future in the business. You had to let everything roll off your back. People would do and say things that you couldn’t let determine your success. It had been a vaguely memorable conversation. But that day, as he looked at me from the truck while he was talking to my customer, I couldn’t tell if he even recalled who I was. He didn’t acknowledge me, but he was certainly registering it was me, not him, who was driving that sale.
My customer and I retrieved his trade-in vehicle and moved it to the used car evaluation area in front of the tent. I got the mileage off the trade-in, ran the keys to my manager, and grabbed the paperwork to begin the sale. It was late afternoon. The tables set up in the tent for were full. I spotted one free table over in the corner. Unfortunately, it was right in front of the heating vent that was blasting hot air into a tent where it was easily already 85°. I couldn’t imagine how I’d keep my cool if I was sitting in the stream of hot air. My customer sensed it wasn’t ideal for him either. We moved the table away from the direct blast, but there was only so much we could do. The hot deal he was hoping to acquire would be precisely that.
We sat down and I sketched how things would proceed. I knew it wasn’t his first rodeo, but it was a good idea to be on the same page so there weren’t any surprises. He knew I was new to the rodeo. I was counting on this guy’s Crosstrek purchase to evidence my mettle and shift me into the higher gear of full-fledged, fully-commissioned sales agent. Because walking around a grass field with hundreds of cars for twelve hours was demoralizing if you weren’t getting paid top dollar.
I started going through the bureaucratic part of the paperwork with him. As we dug in, out of the blue, he said he probably should involve the other salesman we’d run into, the one he’d bought several vehicles from before. This didn’t surprise me. All I could do was go along with his request. When they’d had their little conversation outside, I had wondered if it might come up, that he’d realize at some point the other guy might have hard feelings for not being the person he’d gone to. Maybe he thought he had a better chance of getting the deal he wanted with the guy he knew better. Maybe I’d been the one taken on a ride. I didn’t really care, I just needed the deal to get done with my name on the paperwork so I could graduate from training status and be on my way.
I went over to my manager and had them page the other salesman. Then I went back to the table and we returned to the paperwork. We got through about half the entries when, again, out of nowhere, my customer stated that he exercised his Second Amendment rights and had a firearm in the driver’s side of his trade-in vehicle and he’d notice if the gun wasn’t there when he went to retrieve his belongings. He segued into this brief Second Amendment monologue with a monotone voice and smoothness indicating he’d had to trot that paragraph out on quite a few occasions. I kept my poker face as I took in the information and wondered what I was supposed to do with it. Was packing heat at Oktoberfest really necessary? And how else to read his little interjection except as a kind of assertion of his power? The guy was buying a Crosstrek for goodness sake, not carrying out some clandestine mission. Maybe at some level he felt the need to compensate for his not-so-burly vehicle choice. All I could do was acknowledge I’d heard him, move on to the next line on the form, and remind myself internally that I had to figure out a way to leave this part of the country and live somewhere else.
A few minutes later the other salesman showed up. He re-greeted the guy and watched as I completed the paperwork. The customer pulled out his phone to show us the quote he had from the dealer in Spokane and to reprise his buying parameters. Then we went to retrieve the offer from the managers that we’d be presenting for his approval or rejection. It’s the part of buying a car that people tend to hate the most. Believe me, car salesmen hate it too. Because salesmen have to play a shell game with their managers–who disclose only the most minimal amount of information necessary for the sale to take place–they get caught in the middle, trying to orchestrate two shell games at the same time. The one they’re having with the customer, and the one they’re having with their manager, who holds the purse strings.
We went back to the table with the offer we’d been cleared to present. The other salesman dropped into something he hadn’t clued me in about. In a seemingly good-natured tone of voice he put the customer on the spot, asking him why, if he’d known he was looking for a used vehicle, he hadn’t called him first instead of looking elsewhere. It seemed a tactic to assert control in the negotiation stage. It also seemed to be a pissing contest, and maybe to express disgruntlement that I’d just spent two hours with the customer rather than himself. It was hard to tell, but it struck me as a dumb tactic to employ with a customer who was clearly in the Alpha-male zone and very focused on what he wanted and how he wanted it. It wasn’t any of this other guy’s business where he bought a car and from whom. That’s what I would have thought as a customer, and probably would have said. But the customer didn’t say anything and just took it in stride, keeping his calm eye on the bigger prize. Which in the end, of course, he got. I think the negotiations took about five minutes. We presented one set of figures. He suggested another. The managers signed off on it. And the deal was done. Voila! Crosstrek karma was delivering me into the big time! I shook the customer’s hand and then promptly went back outside to find another sale. Because as they say in the car world: “When is the best time to sell a car? Right after you’ve just sold one!”
I headed out to the automotive pasture once again. I was buoyant from the sale. But mostly because it had filled the last several hours with active engagement rather than pointless canvassing of the lot. It hadn’t been ten minutes when I spotted the other salesman from the sale in the Subaru section, talking to a couple of potential customers. He worked at the Honda dealership. One of the frustrating things about off-site events was that you had to watch a lot of guys sell Subarus knowing they didn’t know them like you did. It’s an easy brand to sell, so for salesmen from the other brands the off-site events were like raiding the candy store. I couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten back there so fast. With my little back pack I was definitely more dressed for the sprint, had at least four inches of height on him, and wasn’t carrying around fifty superfluous pounds in my belly. I could see the people he was talking to weren’t buying whatever he was selling. As they slinked off he started waving me over, trying to get my attention. I figured maybe there was some remaining detail from the sale and walked towards him. Which was a mistake. And not only because it meant I missed my chance scoring with the couple who’d walked away.
When I reached him he looked me up and down, and said, “You’re walking a lot out here aren’t you?” I didn’t immediately see the point of a rhetorical question that he already knew the answer to. Oktoberfest is, by definition, an event where a cadre of salespeople sweep through several acres of car inventory hundreds of times a day in order to intercept potential customers. What else did he think I was doing out there? Before I could answer he followed his query with a jumble of statement and question, delivered within his salesman’s faux-gentle-helpful-earnestness: “Look, I don’t want to offend you. Are you Mormon?” My this-can’t-be-going-anywhere-good feelers were immediately on high alert. I took a quick scan of whether anyone was nearby who could hear us. Simultaneously he repeated his fake overture and odd question. I told him, “No, I’m not Mormon. I’m pagan.” My answer caused a nanosecond of reflux to wash over his face. It was not a response he had anticipated. But like verbal dominoes, the monologue he had come armed with began spilling forth, tumbling forward incrementally to create a patterned effect. He slid into telling me how back in the tent, during the sale, I had smelled bad and that I should probably consider wearing deodorant, but he knows Mormons don’t wear deodorant, and he had smelled himself to make sure it hadn’t been him—which he offered a physical reenactment of on the spot—and then explained where I could buy deodorant and how to use it—which he also physically demonstrated—and how he didn’t want to offend me but it was something I needed to deal with and then he repeated his instructions about where I could buy it and here’s how it’s used. Somewhere in the tumble of his words he specified deodorant was something they sold at Walgreen’s. In case I didn’t know.
I stood there on the grass, trying to take in what he was saying and doing. I couldn’t really process what was happening as it happened. Viscerally, I could feel he was trying to put me in my place. But mentally, I couldn’t make sense of the method. His weird form of misogynist jiu-jitsu was cloaked in a salesman’s disarmingly earnest smoothness. Which made me double back on whether my visceral radar was correct. Was he just clueless? Being petty and retributive for whatever incursion into his sales territory he’d felt I’d made? Trying, through odd tactics, to test me on the very advice he’d given me earlier in the week? But also, simultaneously—and trying not to let it show on my face—it also made me think for a nanosecond about whether what he was saying was true. Even though at some rational level I knew better, the tone of his delivery and the content of what he’d said leveraged some shred of the possible just enough to make me second guess myself.
I scanned through possible causes for what he was claiming. I involuntarily dipped into the vestiges of the good-girl psychic strata that lay deep in the bedrock of my history. Analyze, reason, and believe you are beholden to account for what is being presented. It’s on you, not him. A deep, engrained habituation kicked in, one that is so very hard to shake: Being responsive to—and responsible for—the world as it has been constituted for you by a man’s perspective. I jumped into the role unconsciously, even while, at the very same time, I was pissed and knew the whole thing to be wrong at every level. The split within myself meant I experienced the incident in fragments. The me who was processing it and taking it apart. The me who went along with it, abetted by a childlike remnant of the quickness to believe. The me who wanted to curse very obscene things in his face as I beat the crap out of him.
I’d been out there for six days, twelve hours a day, and had easily logged over a hundred miles of walking. It was late afternoon and the tent had been like a beachfront carnival on a steamy summer day. I also knew a secret detail that he didn’t—I’d be starting my period the next day, which I’d been glad had held off for most of the event, because when it began it would be difficult to stand for twelve hours straight. I also knew its impending arrival altered my body chemistry. I think many of the ladies out there will agree: There are times of our bodily lives when our mammalian flesh is not a biological afterthought, but is front and center in our daily existence. And, really, shouldn’t that be the case? An ordinary, daily recognition and celebration of our mammalian fecundity and biological vitality? My dogs at home could pick up on it, and crazily but fleetingly I was made to wonder whether this guy had picked up on it too. But whereas my dogs smell me in order to learn about their world without judgement, this guy was using smelling to fabricate authority and put me in my place. He’d made it sound like I’d caused a scene back in the tent and had positioned himself as the kind uncle who was discretely clueing me in in order to save me from future embarrassment, talking to me like I was twelve years old. He’d certainly caught me off guard. I kept my wits about me just enough to know that no cloud of odor was following me around like a bad aura needing eradication.
The flurry and faux normality of the interaction transpired in probably a minute. It felt like it ended just as I was beginning to knit together all the facets warranting a decisive and decimating verbal response. But it didn’t come in time. Outwardly, I kept my cool, tried to play off his suggestions casually, and then, through the salve of politeness, took off. I retreated, and he got to walk away.
The weirdness of his strategy had served to buffer or deflect its inappropriateness. I had no idea how self-consciously he had designed that strategy. My best guess was things were actually worse than that. He hadn’t had to self-consciously craft it at all. He’d merely let it well up within his acculturated consciousness, stoking whatever disgruntlement he’d had about me working with his customer, and then coupled it with his patronizing belief that he was helping me out. It was a mundane and very ancient form of gender-driven bullying. He had marked my body as a defilement. As something that just wasn’t acceptable under the boys’ big tent. As a female, I had to be isolated and insulated, my presumed dirtiness something to be shamed in the otherwise shameless world of car sales. My take-away from my first sale hadn’t been the high that everyone else in the industry referred to. It had been a weird, but otherwise very ordinary, example of harassment.
I got through the rest of the night without incident. I was probably in just enough shock to keep me from commandeering a Camaro, driving off the grass, and never looking back. I told my mentor Jake about what had happened. He was incredulous, and said to blow it off. The best thing to do–a solution which came up often in the car sales world–was to channel my anger into my sales, and ensure that I’d have the last laugh.
The next day was the last of Oktoberfest. When it was over we spent several hours moving the remaining unsold cars back to the dealerships. Sadly, I glimpsed Willy’s Wild Ride amongst the week’s remnants. Though it also meant it was still for sale, and was mine for the taking if I could find the right buyer. When you sell cars, anything that moves catches your eye. Which means everything is fair game.
At the end of it all, I didn’t quite feel defeated, but there was definitely less bounce in my little red backpacked step. I went home, and collapsed for two days. Total Reset had hit some bumps in the cosmos. I had to figure out where to go from there. Salespath sure wasn’t going to be my guide, but I knew it had floated into my life to do something. As my feet recovered from the week, I laid on my couch and waited to see what that was.
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You are what your deep driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny.
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
“What are you going to do?!?” my husband asked across the kitchen table. It was a question and mode of delivery I’d heard several times in the past few weeks during my foray in the car world. When I’d started debating whether I should continue, his question was often what I heard in response. The tone with which it was laden said as much as its actual content. His question blended genuine inquiry with a touch of alarm. It always sparked a ringlet of terror in my heart. It was precisely the question I’d been asking myself for over a year as I reckoned with how to rebuild a thriving professional life out in the conservative suburban/rural sprawl of Eastern Washington. For me to ask myself internally was one thing. To have it vocalized by my husband across the table was quite another.
In the wake of Oktoberfest, with my doubts about continuing piqued, I told him his question only enhanced the freak-out potential of my circumstance rather than spurring me into any kind of clarity. I didn’t know what I was going to do. And I hadn’t known for some time. The suspension of not knowing had fueled the fires of Total Reset. But the fire seemed to be burning down a lot more than it was productively heating. With my husband’s terror-inducing question off the table, we had to figure out other ways to talk about how I’d navigate the suspension and how we’d do so together. Turns out I’d been placing the locus of Total Reset in the wrong spot all along.
I returned to Subaru with diminished gusto after Oktoberfest, if with openness. Perhaps once I was back on more familiar turf the benefits of the job would remind me of why the downsides were worth it. I still thought there was a chance I could pull it off. Or that I should try. Even though should-statements were at odds with the ethos of Total Reset, they sure had a sneaky way of coming back at every turn. Between the sense of should, my stubbornness, and my propensity towards belief, I eked out another month. Then one Saturday, after I’d sold a car, I had to give Jake a ride back from a customer’s house, where he’d dropped off their new Forester. I was cruising in a 2018 Legacy Sport, which I can highly recommend. On the ride back Emmylou Harris’ “Born to Run” came on the radio. I cranked up the volume and sang my heart out. Jake indulged me. When we got back to the dealership, I finished out the shift, left all my keys and security doodads on my desk, and walked away without saying a word.
It wasn’t really the Oktoberfest odor debacle that had sealed the deal. Though it hadn’t been inconsequential. One of the primary culprits was that I abhored wasted time. After all the training was done, the reality was that large swaths of a car sales day are empty hours of waiting. Every time I walked the lot to kill some time I knew I was slivering off some juicy bits of my soul. The other main culprit was that the reality of working until nine at night–and every weekend–for years on end, was not going to jibe with married life. It had taken me awhile to find marriage, and taking risks with its vitality wasn’t an option.
I had known the schedule realities before diving in, but it wasn’t until I was living them that the sacrifices involved became palpable. Even more simply, I loved being around my husband. And there were several co-workers who I most distinctly didn’t love being around. It will sound an exaggeration, but since love knows no calculus, it doesn’t matter: One uneventful evening with my husband was more valuable than a 13-unit month at a 25% commission rate. Even the lure of selling Willy’s Wild Ride wasn’t enough. Since my financial back wasn’t totally in a corner yet and I had no children to support, I could side with my marriage over my job and afford to try again somewhere else. I knew a lot of people who worked there—who work anywhere—didn’t have that luxury. But I did. And I wasn’t going to squander it.
As the car experiment was unraveling, my husband and I still talked every night over our kitchen table, late, after I’d come home from work. He’d been making all our dinners and saving me a plate. Some nights I’d regale him with stories and details from the car sales world. Some nights I’d be airing my worries and uncertainties about what I was doing. If my prolonged period of career vertigo was wearing thin, he sure wasn’t letting it show.
My husband is, like all men, complex. Like all good men, he is complex in compelling ways. Principally he is a man of directness, whether in speech or action. The concrete and the practical, not the speculative or the theoretical, are the terrain he prefers to inhabit. Hence his pointed question about what was I going to do with my life. He’s also a man of surprising tenderness and adaptability, always placing care above antagonism, a recognition of the center above the fray of the ultimately inconsequential.
At our kitchen table, in the waning days of my Subaru escapade, we started talking about things we’d never been pressed into talking about before. We had to discuss a lot of things not as musings about the future, but as actual reckonings with what we wanted for ourselves and how we would make it happen. What did we most want to experience? What kind of daily life was most satisfying? How would my life as a writer be complemented by my ability to contribute to our material realities? How much money, really, did we need every year, and for what? What else did he want to do, beyond his current job? Where did we really want to live? And, the harder one, the one we’d avoided since my miscarriage: If a child won’t be in our life together, what will we be united for? The questions rose and circled through us at our kitchen table, the place where the boundaries of desires and needs, of self and spouse, bled into each other, saturating our union with the honesty and intimacy that makes marriage both intensely mundane and sacrosanct all at once.
As the conversation took root, I recognized the shifts and openings between myself and my husband were the very kind of interjection I had yearned for, if in a form that was less immediately dramatic. The beautiful and mysterious thing about love unions—and there’s all kinds of love unions—is their creation of the very interjection the relationship needs, in precisely the way the relationship can receive it. The mechanisms by which this happens are delicate and often unremarkable, but that it happens at all is marvelous and extraordinary. Just when you think it has all gone opaque, an ocean shadow spread across the face of a life, or a wine-dark sea threatening a life shared, a blinding shard of brightness will break through, bidding you to remember the ground beneath, turning you around to go work the land once again.
Marriage is a total solar eclipse, just without the funny glasses. And without the seven-year wait. You can behold it every day, from the plains of virtue. When the terrain gets rough, you can always hop into Willy’s Wild Ride, blast the stereo, and shake things up with a test drive. Go find a little oasis in the wilderness for each other, for yourself, and get down to business with your deepest driving desire. That’s what I did. And that’s how we got here.