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Chapter 3

BEFORE MY NEWSPAPER CAREER actually began (like all other careers, a writing career actually begins when you begin getting paid), I spent one morning as a salesman and three months working at a bank. These vocations didn’t last longer because I couldn’t sell anything and because the only way I could have found working at a bank interesting would have been if they allowed me to handle some of the money. Unfortunately, I never saw even one roll of pennies.

How all this came about is how a lot of things come about. I was in love. King Edward renounced his throne because he was in love. I suppose that was Steve Garvey’s excuse, too. So why not me?

I was in love with Paula. I fell for her madly in the eighth grade, dated her exclusively throughout high school, and would eventually marry her.

Love in the sixties was quite different from love in the nineties.

We didn’t have such things in the sixties as recreational pregnancies or Kim Basinger and Prince. All we did was drive around the Dairy Queen or go to the drive-in and grind our lips together while Rock Hudson was wooing Doris Day. We know all about Rock now, but did you hear the rumor about Doris Day once making it with Wilt Chamberlain?

My friend Ronnie Jenkins said he read about it in one of those newspapers they sell at the grocery checkout counter. Ronnie was in the grocery store buying wienies. We still had wienie roasts in those days. (There’s a Rock Hudson line in there somewhere, but tempt me not, evil Muse.)

Paula. She was lovely, tall, and blond, and she wanted to be a model. She decided college would be a complete waste of her time, so upon graduation she took a job in Atlanta at a bank and enrolled in one of those modeling schools where they teach you to walk that way.

I had been accepted at the University of Georgia, where I would study journalism, beginning in the fall. What to do with the three summer months after my high school graduation, that was the key question.

After giving it about eleven seconds of thought, I decided to go to Atlanta myself and seek summer employment, thus allowing me to be near my beloved Paula, who, for the first time in her life, would not be near her mother. This had possibilities I had heretofore never dreamed of. Remember, this was 1964. I still had the unused condom I had bought at Steve Smith’s truck stop in 1959.

My friend Ronnie Jenkins also had found work in an Atlanta bank. The idea was for me to find a job, for Ronnie and me to get an apartment near the apartment Paula and her friend had taken, and for the rest to be the great summer of ’64, especially if we could find somebody of age to buy beer for us.

Ronnie found a one-bedroom apartment in a duplex on Atlanta’s Sixth Street, which was just showing the signs of becoming a slum. Paula’s place was not far away, perhaps the distance a mugger could make in ten minutes if he was the subject of hot pursuit.

I began an ardent search for the job. My first stop, obviously, was at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. After college, it was my intention to go to work for one of the papers.

I realized I wasn’t going to be hired to cover baseball for the summer, but I reasoned that when I told whoever I’d have to talk to of my future intentions, that person would realize it might be wise to go ahead and hire me for the summer so a lot of orientation wouldn’t be necessary when I returned four years later with my journalism degree and the knowledge that would include, such as knowing who invented movable type, Johannes Gutenberg.

The paper was located at 10 Forsyth Street, next door to Union Station, which served the L & N Railroad. A few passenger trains still stopped and departed there, the most notable, the Georgian, ran from Atlanta to St. Louis. We are talking the fourth quarter of preAmtrak passenger trains, and Union Station had that forgotten-but-not-gone look to it.

I asked the security guard at the paper to direct me to the personnel department. I caught an elevator to the third floor. There was a lady at a desk.

I said, “Hello. My name is Lewis Grizzard, and I’ll be majoring in journalism at Georgia this fall. I’d like to see about a summer job here, since I’m going to be pursuing a newspaper career upon my graduation.”

The woman at the desk looked at me as if perhaps I had a booger peering out of one of my nostrils. Finally, she spoke. “We don’t have any summer jobs,” she said.

And that’s all she said. I wished she had said more, because I was already nervous enough, and now, with one small statement, uttered in somewhat of a you’ve-got-to-be-nuts tone of voice, I really had no place to go with the conversation.

“So,” I finally stammered, “let me see if I have this straight. You don’t have any summer jobs. Am I correct?”

“That’s what I said,” said the woman.

I looked down at the floor, which is a great place to look when you’re dead, you know you’re dead, and all you want at that point is to think of a way to exit gracefully.

I must admit I was rather shocked at the coldness the woman had shown me. You spend your entire childhood dreaming of a newspaper career, and then you can’t get past a personnel secretary when you apply for your first job.

I recall vividly what I said to the woman as I left. I said, “Well, thank you for your time,” which wasn’t exactly a graceful way to leave. As a matter of fact, it was a rather puny way to leave.

Later, I wished I had said, “Okay, you win round one, but I’ll be back in four years and we’ll see who wins round two.”

Why is it you never think of clever things like that to say until it’s too late? I don’t have an answer, but the question reminds me of a story that has nothing to do with me or the newspaper business, but does have to do with wishing.

Two guys from Detroit are driving through rural South Carolina at the precise speed limit in a new Cadillac. A deputy sheriff, parked in the bushes, spots the car, sees the Michigan license plate on the Cadillac, and figures, “They got to be doing something wrong.”

He pulls the car over, and walks over to the driver’s side.

The window is still up, so the deputy sheriff takes out his nightstick and taps three times on the glass. The driver, quite smugly, pushes the power window button.

Zuuuuuu. The window comes down.

The sheriff immediately begins to beat the driver upon his head and shoulders with his nightstick.

“What are you doing?” screams the driver. “I wasn’t speeding.”

The deputy, having administered what he considered an appropriate amount of blows, replies:

“Let me tell you something. The next time you are driving through South Carolina and a law-enforcement officer pulls you over, you have your window down and your driver’s license in your hand ready to be inspected. Do you understand?”

“I certainly do, Officer, sir,” said the driver, as his head continued to swell.

The deputy then walked around to the passenger’s side. The window there was still closed.

Tap, tap, tap, went the deputy’s nightstick, on the window.

Zuuuuu went the window as it came down.

As soon as there was a big enough opening, the deputy began to beat the passenger with his nightstick.

“What’s wrong with you, man?” asked the passenger, knots beginning to appear on him as well.

“I’m just making your wish come true,” said the deputy.

“What wish?”

“Let me tell you something,” said the deputy, “I know and you know that when y’all get about three miles down the road, you’re going to turn to your friend then and say, ‘I wish that son-of-a-bitch had hit me with that stick!”

As I stepped back on the elevator and pushed the button to take me back to the streets—defeated in my first attempt to begin my real newspaper career—it occurred to me that what I should do is find out where the Journal sports department was located, go there, find Furman Bisher Himself, and share my career intentions with him. On the way down in the elevator, I played Fantasy Interview:

“Mr. Bisher?”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Bisher, sir, my name is Lewis Grizzard. I’m going to attend the University of Georgia in the fall, and I intend to major in journalism, learn everything there is to know about it, and then return here after graduation to work for you.

“I admit that at the present time I have no earthly idea who invented movable type, but you can bet your butt I’ll know in four years.

“But what I was wondering, sir, is that since I am obviously a bright and promising young man, is there any way you could give me a summer job?”

“You’ve been to see personnel?” Mr. Bisher would reply.

“Yes, sir, but I couldn’t get past the secretary.”

“I know her, the old bat. She wouldn’t know a bright and promising young man from a Shetland pony. My boy, you have come to the right place. I happen to need—just for the summer—somebody to travel all over the world with me to take notes, make certain I have enough typing paper and fresh ribbons for my typewriter.

“There will, of course, be a great deal of travel involved. We’ll be going to the U.S. Open golf tournament, Wimbledon, to the All-Star baseball game and other such places. When can you come aboard?”

Just then, the elevator door opened onto the ground floor. I walked out, found a security guard, and asked him where the Journal sports department was located.

“Go to the fourth floor,” he said, “take a right off the elevator. First door on your right.”

I got back on the elevator and pushed 4. I got off the elevator, took a right, and walked into the first door on my right.

The room was small. There were maybe ten desks crammed together. All the desks had manual typewriters sitting on top of them. All of them also had immense amounts of such items as unopened mail, brown typing paper, ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, an occasional empty doughnut box, black telephones, empty coffee cups, and on one desk I spotted a box of Mueller’s spaghetti sticks. I made a mental note to ask one of my future journalism professors the significance of such a find.

There was also a horseshoe-shaped desk in the room, with chairs on the two outside rims. Inside the horseshoe sat another chair. On the desk was a glass pot filled with what appeared to be glue. The desk seemed to be the central focus of the room. Something important went on at that desk, I concluded.

Behind the horseshoe desk sat a teletype machine that spit out words at an astounding rate. I walked over to the machine. It was typing the current major-league baseball standings. I had no idea as to where the source of this machine was located, but the sound of it gave out both a sense of urgency and energy. This, I reasoned, was the background music for the practice of big-time sports journalism. Against that sound, it seemed to me, a man could put zest in the words he typed. That sound likely was what set Furman Bisher into his mood to crank out his poetry.

To my left, I saw a glass-enclosed office. The door to it was closed. On the door it said, FURMAN BISHER, SPORTS EDITOR.

This was Furman Bisher’s office! I looked through the glass. There was a desk, just as cluttered as the ones outside. An obviously elderly manual typewriter sat on a table near the desk. The Oval Office in the White House could not have impressed me any more.

This was it. This was where Furman Bisher wrote. All those columns of his I’d read since childhood came out of this hallowed place. Bisher on riding the train to Little Rock with the Atlanta Crackers. Bisher on Bobby Dodd, the legendary Georgia Tech football coach. Bisher from the World Series. Bisher from the Kentucky Derby. Bisher from the Masters.

I was looking at where Michelangelo mixed his paints, where Edison conceived the light bulb, where Alexander the Great plotted his battles, where Irving Berlin beat out the first notes of “White Christmas.”

I knew I would work in this place one day. Sometimes you just know, the way you know you won’t like liver even if you’ve never tried it. It wasn’t going to be this summer. The idea of talking to a man of Furman Bisher’s stature and having him be so awed by my only credentials—the fact I was Lewis Grizzard, the future journalism student—that he would give me a summer job as his caddie, suddenly seemed a bit ridiculous.

But at least I had been to this room. I had heard the sound of the teletype and seen my first glue pot. And I had noticed a certain order to all the mess. This is what I thought a sports department at a large newspaper would look and feel and sound like, and one day I would be in the middle of it. I had seen my dream, I had stood in it, listened to it, and, by God, it would come true.

I swore to devote myself to that end. It didn’t matter what it would take. I would do it.

Just before I left the room, I said something to it. Out loud. “I’ll be back,” I said. Profound, no. But filled with determination.

I returned to the elevator and pushed the button for the ground floor again. I hadn’t accomplished what I had wanted to accomplish, a summer job, but being in that place had stoked the fire in my belly.

I had to walk back past Union Station to get to my car. There was a newspaper box in front of the station. “Aha, the classified ads,” I said to myself.

I put a dime in the box, took out a copy of the Journal, fresh from next door. I walked into the station. It was a death wish inside, dark and lifeless. A wino was asleep on one of the benches in the waiting room. He, like everything else in the place, was covered with grime. But at least it was quiet, save the wino’s occasional snore. And I had spotted a pay phone. So I pulled away the front section of the paper, put it down on one of the filthy benches, and sat on it.

I went directly to the classifieds and began to read under the “Help Wanted” section. Amid all the small type was a display ad that stopped me.

“Do you like people?” asked the ad. “Would you like to make as much as $125 per week in the exciting field of sales?”

How did they know this was just what I was looking for? I loved people. I could hang out with people the rest of my life and never get tired of it. And $125 a week? I looked back at the ad to make certain it hadn’t said “month” instead of “week.” It did say “week.”

Classes at Georgia didn’t start until the middle of September. I counted up the weeks and figured I could make nearly eighteen hundred dollars in that period, getting rich in the exciting field of sales just by liking people.

I called the number given in the ad. A woman answered. I introduced myself and explained I was the man the ad was looking for.

“First,” said the woman, “I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Go ahead,” I shot back, my confidence at eye level.

“Do you like people?”

“Do I like people? I love people. People to me are, well, what it’s all about. I mean, you give me some people, and I’ll like them right away. I don’t even care what kind of people they are. As long as I know they’re people, you can bet I’m going to like them. What’s the next question?”

“Could you come by this afternoon?”

I had the job. No question. Eighteen hundred big ones. The first thing I would do would be to buy Paula one of those Evening in Paris perfume sets, the one that also came with the powder.

The woman gave me the address of the office. I said I could be there in half an hour.

Driving to my interview, a question came to mind. Ever notice that when everything is really going great for you, annoying questions come to mind?

There you are, having just finished a term paper, and you think, This is a great term paper. Then a question pops into your mind. “I wonder if the teacher is going to count off for spelling?”

You have a date with a great-looking girl. You’re standing outside her door, awaiting her arrival, and a question pops into your mind. “Do I have a booger?”

The plane is about to take off for Cancun. You feel great. Then, a question pops into your mind. “Are Eastern’s mechanics still unhappy?”

The question as I drove to the interview was, “What will they want me to sell in the exciting field of sales?”

That hadn’t occurred to me before. They could want me to sell any number of things. My mind raced. Vacuum cleaners? Boats? Shoes?

I had an older cousin who worked in a shoe store once. He said you got to look up a lot of woman’s dresses, but it was tough on your back.

What if they wanted me to sell jewelry or soap or flower seeds or salt? This salt salesman came into the store back in Moreland once and convinced Miles Perkins, the owner, to buy six hundred boxes of salt.

Loot Starkins walked into the store next day, saw all that salt, and said to Miles, “You must sell an awful lot of salt.”

“Naw,” said Miles, “but there was a fellow come by here yesterday could flat sell the hell out of it.”

What if I couldn’t sell whatever it was they wanted me to sell? I could like people and want to make as much as $125 a week in the exciting field of sales, but what if I couldn’t convince anybody to buy whatever it was I was selling?

Would they still pay you in that case?

“Well, Lewis,” the boss would say, “how many boxes of salt did you sell today?”

“Actually, sir,” I would say, “not a one.”

“But did you like the people you met?”

“Loved ’em.”

“Fine, then, here’s your week’s check for as much as a hundred twenty-five dollars.”

But that didn’t sound realistic to me, and I noticed I was beginning to perspire. With my confidence level having sunk all the way to my thighs, I drove into the parking lot of a six-story building, got out of my car, and went inside.

I entered the elevator, went to the fourth floor, as the woman on the phone had instructed me to do (I made a mental note to point out how I had followed instructions well), and looked for an office marked 452.

I found 452. The name of the company wasn’t on the door. Just 452.

Do you knock first? How did I know? I’d never interviewed for a job before. Did you knock or did you simply open the door, walk in, and state your business? Why hadn’t they covered some of this in high school? What the hell was I supposed to do with two years of algebra and general science at this particular moment?

I decided simply to open the door, walk in, and state my business. The door was locked.

I knocked on the door. Nothing. I knocked harder. Still nothing. My underarms were a rice paddy. So I banged on the window with my fist.

Suddenly, the door swung open, and there stood a man. He had a thin mustache and was wearing a black suit that was very shiny. He looked like a cross between Zorro and a salt salesman.

“Don’t let it be salt,” I said to myself. I couldn’t even sell a box to Miles Perkins back home. He still had three hundred boxes left.

“Come in, kid,” said Zorro. I noticed his shoes weren’t shined, and one of the collars on his white shirt was frayed. When he began talking to me, he talked out of the side of his mouth because on the other side there dangled an unfiltered cigarette, the ashes of which defied all laws of gravity. The cigarette, I could see, was a Chesterfield.

Then it hit me. Used cars! I’d seen used-car salesmen before. They wore shiny suits, their collars were frayed, they talked out of one side of their mouth, and they smoked Chesterfields out of the other.

I knew about used-car salesmen. They’d sell a clunker to their own mother and didn’t love the Lord. What if I spent the summer selling used cars and showed up on the campus of the University of Georgia with no morals and unshined shoes?

I looked around the office. I didn’t see the woman I had talked to on the phone. As a matter of fact, all that was in the office was the desk, one chair, one phone, and a lot of cigarette ashes on the floor.

“I spoke with the lady on the phone earlier,” I began. I noticed my voice went up on the “earlier,” and I had made my statement in nearly the form of a question.

I had noticed that about myself and about others before. Whenever one isn’t sure about one’s self, one tends to raise the level of one’s voice when one comes to the last word of one’s statements in the form of near-questions. But I don’t know why.

“What’s your name, kid?” asked Zorro.

“One,” I replied, “No, no, it’s not. I’m sorry, I was thinking about something else. My name is Lewis. Lewis Grizzard, and I like people and I would also like to make as much as a hundred twenty-five dollars a week in the exciting field of sales. But I wouldn’t cheat my mother.”

The man looked puzzled.

“I mean,” I quickly added, “My mother already has a car and it runs well, so I don’t think she’ll be looking for another one anytime soon.”

“You okay, kid?”

I could tell I was blowing it. What if I didn’t get this job and had to go back home to Moreland and not live with Ronnie in his apartment that was near Paula? What if I and my already-aging condom had to go back home together? The summer of ’64. The summer from hell.

“Look, kid,” said the man, as the ashes finally fell off his cigarette and onto his shoes, “I got a warehouse full of encyclopedias I need to move. I’m hiring four guys to help me. I got three. You meet me here at seven each morning. We drive out in a van and I drop each of you off in a neighborhood with a sales kit. You work the neighborhood. I pick you back up at five. You move the books, I pay you a commission. No sales, no money. You want the job or not?”

“This ad said I could make as much as a hundred twenty-five dollars a week,” I said. “Is this true?”

“Could be. More books you move, the more money you make. I ain’t no fortune-teller. I don’t know how much money you can make. It all depends on you. Now, I’m busy. Be here at seven in the morning.”

“You don’t want me to fill out an application or something?” I asked. “I have a high school diploma, and I was active in sports and clubs.”

“Kid,” the man said, and I could see he was becoming annoyed, “I don’t care if you didn’t make it through kindergarten. Either you’ll sell the books, or you won’t. You sell ’em, fine. You don’t, that’s fine, too. I’ll find somebody who can. Be here at seven.”

I walked out of the office. My first thought was, What happened to the woman with whom I had talked on the phone? She seemed pleasant enough.

And why hadn’t Zorro asked me anything about how much I liked people? It wouldn’t have been in the ad if it hadn’t been important.

He hadn’t asked anything about my references, either. I was going to put down my high school principal, my senior English teacher, and my basketball coach.

And what about all those times teachers had warned us, “Foul this up and it could go on your permanent record”?

I hadn’t fouled up one thing in high school. As far as I know, I had a completely unblemished permanent record. But this guy hadn’t asked me, “Is there anything on your permanent record I should know about before we sign a contract?”

I never even chewed gum in high school. I didn’t want it on my permanent record. I never smoked in the boys’ bathroom like Ronnie Jenkins did. What was going on here? Disillusionment had replaced all my confidence.

Just then, a woman walked out of the elevator and came toward me. “Excuse me,” I said. I introduced myself and continued, “Were you the one I talked to on the phone a little while ago? I was the one who liked people. Remember?”

The woman looked at me for a second. It was not a nice look.

“I’m Margie,” she said. “I answer the phone for Dipstick in there and go out for beer. He couldn’t make a living selling used cars because he was too big a creep even for that, so now it’s encyclopedias. What else would you like to know?”

“Can I really expect to make as much as a hundred twenty-five dollars a week in the exciting field of encyclopedia sales?” I asked.

“Wear loose-fitting shoes and don’t get too close to the door so you don’t get your nose broke when they slam the door in your face,” said Margie, as she turned and walked into room 452, slamming the door in my face.

I went back to Ronnie’s apartment and told him I had a job.

“Doing what?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I had to say, “but can I borrow your Weejuns to wear to work in the morning? Mine aren’t broken in yet.”

Dipstick’s (Zorro’s) name turned out to be Howard Barnes. He was one mean son of a bitch in the afternoon. At seven in the morning, he was Hitler with a hangover.

The next day at 7:00 A.M., four budding encyclopedia salesmen stood in front of Hitler. Two of the guys looked older than I was. They were probably in their early thirties. One continuously sniffed on a Vick’s inhaler. Another one wore a short-sleeved shirt and had a tattoo of a rather sinister-looking snake on his left forearm. I didn’t know much about the exciting field of sales at that point, but I did know having a tattoo of a snake on your arm probably wouldn’t help in winning the confidence of a potential customer.

The other guy looked to be about my age, or a year or two older. He was quite skinny, and his hair was in a state of complete anarchy. It looked like a clump of palm trees just after a hurricane hit.

The tiny office was hot and filled with Chesterfield smoke. Howard sat behind his desk and looked us over, much as a person would look over a plate of fried rat.

“I’ll be surprised if this goddamn group can sell one goddamn encyclopedia,” Harold began.

His eyes stopped at Kudzu Head.

“What’n hell’s your name?” he asked the kid.

“Larry,” the kid answered.

“What the hell kind of hair is that, Larry?” Howard asked in a manner that made it quite clear he didn’t like the name Larry or anybody named Larry.

“Just my hair,” said Larry.

“I’ve seen better-looking hair than that on fatback,” Howard sneered, despite the fact Larry bore no resemblance to John Cameron Swayze.

“Awright,” he said next, “everybody downstairs and into the van.”

I entered the exciting field of sales for the first and last time at approximately 8:30 A.M. in Pinewood Hills, a subdivision in suburban Atlanta. I was wearing the only suit I owned, a blue one. I wore a red-and-white striped tie and a white shirt, oxford cloth with buttondown collars, neither one of which was frayed, and Ronnie’s loose-fitting Weejuns.

I carried my sales kit, which was nothing more than a folded poster that showed a picture of Howard’s encyclopedias, and about a dozen order blanks.

Howard had given us precious little instruction. In fact, upon letting me out of the van at the entrance to Pinewood Hills subdivision, all he had said was, “I’ll meet you back here at five.”

There I stood.

Pinewood Hills looked to be an upper-middle-class neighborhood. The houses didn’t appear to be over five or six years old. They were mostly ranch, with covered garages sitting on half-acre lots. The lawns were neat. I noticed swing sets in a few of the backyards. My keen sales instincts said to me that meant there were children to go with them, and what better educational tool was there than a set of encyclopedias?

I opened my poster. There were fourteen volumes in each set of encyclopedias, according to the picture. A set cost $189.99. The deal was, you could pay 10 percent down and pay the rest upon delivery of the encyclopedias. If you paid up front, however, you would receive 10 percent off. Howard said we could take checks. “The piss-ants probably don’t have that much cash laying around the house,” he had explained.

I decided to work from right to left. I’d start at the first house on the right, then cross over to the first house on my left. A salesman needs a plan.

A plan. I hadn’t thought of that. I was a salesman without a sales pitch. You didn’t just walk up to a body’s front door and say, “Want to buy a set of encyclopedias?”

That certainly hadn’t worked for the guy who sold toothbrushes on the sidewalk. People would walk by, and he would ask, “Want to buy a toothbrush?”

He never sold a one. But then he got a plan. He made some cookies and put dog do-do in them. When people would walk by, he would say, “How about a free cookie?”

People would bite into the cookie and then spit it out. “This cookie,” they would exclaim, “tastes like dog do-do!” At which point the salesman would say, “That’s what it’s made out of. Want to buy a toothbrush?”

I decided to go with the old “I’m-working-my-way-through-college” routine. I would knock on a door, and when someone opened it, I would say:

“Hello. My name is Lewis Grizzard, and I am working my way through college. I’m selling encyclopedias, and I was wondering if perhaps you would be interested in buying a set.”

The person at the door would say, “Well, Timmy’s about to start school, and maybe a set of encyclopedias would really be a help to him. Won’t you come on in? Would you like some coffee before we start?”

I would say, “Yes, please, Cream only. What a nice house you have, Mrs. . . .”

“Carpenter. Mrs. Carpenter. How about a doughnut with your coffee?”

“That would be nice, Mrs. Carpenter,” I would say, and that would be all there was to it. Just that, I’d have my first sale on my way to earning as much as $125 per week.

Nobody came to the door at the first house. At the second, a small child answered.

I asked, “Is your mother home?”

The small child turned around and screamed, “Mommy! There’s a man at the door!”

And Mommy screamed back, “What does he want?”

The kid said to me, “What do you want?”

“I’m selling encyclopedias.”

The kid turned around and screamed again, “He’s selling plysopdias!”

And Mommy screamed back, “Tell him we don’t want any.”

“We don’t want any,” the kid said to me, and slammed the door in my face.

At the third house, a woman came to the door with curlers in her hair. She wore a bathrobe and a pair of fuzzy slippers.

Having been married to three women who were devoted to wearing curlers in their hair and fuzzy shoes on their feet, I have, over the years, put a great deal of thought into this uniquely female getup. My conclusions—remember that I am still concluding, which happens a lot when a man considers various behavioral patterns of women—is that they put curlers in their hair not to curl their hair but to pick up radio stations without having to turn on a radio.

My scientific knowledge is somewhat limited, but I know my ex-wives often had enough metal in their hair to pick up radio stations as far away as Del Rio, Texas. When they picked up rock stations, you actually could see their curlers moving to the raucous beat of the music. Thus, the term “hair-raising music.”

Their curlers were the early runners to the Walkman, and I have further concluded that one of the reasons women say strange things while their hair is up in curlers is they are trying to think at the same time radio waves are bombarding their brains. This causes such utterances as, “You don’t love me and it’s fifty-five on the Southside” and “Why don’t we ever talk anymore? Hi, I’m Casey Kasem.”

As for fuzzy shoes, that’s simple. Women wear fuzzy shoes to keep their feet warm. Women’s feet are always cold. It’s a simple fact of nature, or a quirk of anatomy. Women’s feet are always cold, their bladders are the size of a White Acre pea, and they can hear whispers at three hundred paces if they figure the whisper involves another woman or a piece of gossip. (And, yes, I realize this entire parenthetical exercise is overtly sexist in nature. Recall, however, the time frame in which I am currently writing is 1964, before sexism was invented by a group of women wearing hair curlers and receiving some liberal talk-show blather from public radio.)

I started my sales pitch. The woman interrupted me and said, with an accompanying snarl, “I don’t care who you are and what you’re selling!”

The force of the door slamming to in my face must have jolted Richter scales. There is nothing quite as belittling, I was beginning to understand, as a door being slammed in your face. It said volumes, which could be condensed down to such few words as: “Get the hell away from me, you creep.”

I lasted in the exciting field of sales until eleven that morning. I didn’t sell a single set of encyclopedias. I was allowed in only two houses.

In one, a small poodle dog kept yapping throughout my entire sales pitch. When I finally had finished giving it, the would-be customer, a lady in her sixties, said, “Sorry, but Mr. Binghampton and I don’t read very much.”

At the second house, before I even introduced myself and stated my purpose, a lady said, “Come on in, the set’s in the den.”

She thought I was the television repairman she had called. Do television repairman wear ties on house calls? I wondered. When I told the woman I wasn’t the television repairman but a salesman of encyclopedias, she said, “I don’t want any encyclopedias. I want my television fixed. Do you know anything about televisions?”

I said that I didn’t.

She showed me the door.

I walked out of the subdivision and found a bus stop. When the bus came, I left my sales kit on the sidewalk, got on the bus, and retired.

I would often wonder later what ever became of Howard Barnes.

Many years later, there would appear on television sets across the country a left-handed guitar player/singer/yodeler named Slim Whitman. He would have a pencil-thin mustache and would appear somewhat shiftless. All I’m saying is if Slim Whitman doesn’t look like an ex-used car/encyclopedia salesman, a 1957 Plymouth will start on the first try on a cold morning in February.

The morning after my early retirement from sales, jobless again, I drove back to downtown Atlanta, parked at Union Station again, and got into banking in a matter of hours. I headed down Marietta Street and came to the First National Bank. Why not? I walked inside and located the personnel department.

“I’m Lewis Grizzard,” I said, leaving out the part about my future in journalism, “and I was wondering if you have any job openings.”

A woman, pleasant for a change, handed me an application. I filled it out, gave it back to her, and then she said, “I must ask you to take our standard test.”

Test? That concerned me. What sort of test would I have to take? A test about banking? All I really knew about banking was, the pens were always missing when you went into a bank to cash a check or fill out a deposit slip.

Although most banks went to the trouble of attaching their pens to their desks with little chains, the pens still were always missing, which concerned me greatly. How can an institution be trusted to watch over my money when it couldn’t even keep people from stealing its pens in broad daylight?

The woman handed me the test and directed me to a small room. Inside the room was one chair and one desk.

“Complete the test and bring it back to me,” said the woman.

I went into the room and sat down in the chair. Then I realized I didn’t have a pen. There wasn’t one on the desk, either. I was certain someone had stolen it.

I walked back outside and asked the woman, “Do you have a pen?”

“I’ve got one here somewhere,” she said, beginning a search of the top of her desk. Failing there, she began to pull out desk drawers. She didn’t find a pen there, either. Finally, she went to her purse. No pen.

“Let me ask Mr. Gleegenhammer, the personnel director, if he has one,” she said.

A few minutes later, the woman returned with a pen.

“It’s the only one Mr. Gleegenhammer has,” she informed me. “Be certain to return it when you’re finished with your test.”

I thought to myself, If I really wanted to make a lot of money in my life, what I would do is sell pens to banks.

Instantly recalling my previous experience in the exciting field of sales, however, I took the pen and went to work on the test.

It was a pretty easy test. On the left side of the test, I found a number. Let’s say the number was 314. On the right, I found five numbers. Let’s say they were, 11, 478, 6, 925, 314, and 9. The idea was to circle the number in the right series of numbers that was the same as the one on the left.

My test score was perfect. Why had I wasted my time studying algebra? I could have aced the test with the mathematical knowledge I received playing with my counting blocks when I was four.

“You did quite well on your test,” the woman said. (You mean people come in here who don’t?) “Mr. Gleegenhammer will see you now.”

“Give me my pen back,” said Mr. Gleegenhammer as soon as I had sat down in the chair in front of his desk. The next thing he said was, “We currently have an opening in our loan-payment department. It pays sixty dollars a week.”

“Hmm,” I said to myself. “Banking apparently doesn’t pay as well as the exciting field of sales.” But banking also didn’t involve hoofing it around some neighborhood getting doors slammed in your face.

“I’ll take it,” I told Mr. Gleegenhammer.

“Fine,” he replied, “Report to the loan-payment department in the morning at eight and see Mr. Killingsworth.”

I thought about asking, “What will I be doing in the loan-payment department?” but it wouldn’t have mattered. It was obviously inside work with no heavy lifting involved, and if that idiot test was an example of the mental prowess it would take to work in the loanpayment department, I figured by eight-thirty the next morning I’d be able to perform any task put before me. I might even make vice president. Mr. Gleegenhammer hadn’t asked if I had wanted temporary or permanent employment, so I hadn’t volunteered such information. A couple of weeks before classes started at Georgia, I’d simply announce I had been thinking it over, that banking just wasn’t my pot of glue, and that I had decided to go to college and study journalism. What could they do to me? Put something bad on my permanent record? Ronnie Jenkins had been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom about a thousand times, and that fact had been put on his permanent record, but Ronnie had got a job at a bank, too, so banks apparently had very little interest in permanent records.

I’ll get my duties in the loan-payment department over in a hurry: Customers who borrowed money from the First National Bank of Atlanta—and I would find there were many such people—received loan-payment books, made up of computer cards.

You know these cards. Do not fold, staple, or mutilate these cards. There is a reason the bank doesn’t want you to do that. I’ll get to why later.

Each loan-payment card had the amount of the monthly installment printed on it. The idea was for customers to send in their loan-payment cards with a check for the exact amount shown on the card. Me and a guy named Harvey, who had zits and a beard made up of three hairs, would open the envelopes with the cards and checks inside them. We would put the checks into one pile and the cards in the other. We would make several stacks, called “runs,” of checks and cards.

We would then add each stack of checks on an adding machine. We would do the same with the cards. In a perfect world, the total of the checks would be the exact total of the cards.

But this is an imperfect world, and that is what made working in the loan-payment department of the First National Bank of Atlanta a frustrating experience.

Dingbat customers, whom I came to hate, would have a payment of, say, $19.99 per month. And they would say to themselves, “I’ll make it easy for Lewis and Harvey down at the bank and make my check out for an even twenty.”

So I would add the stack of checks, and it would be one cent more than the total of the corresponding cards, and it would take me hours to go back through the stack and find the check and card that didn’t match.

After finally getting a balance of checks and cards, I then had to carry all the cards to a machine on another floor. The machine, which was the first computer I ever saw (and not much of one, I suppose, compared to those of today) would add the total of the cards again, serving as a backup for the total Harvey and I had got earlier on the adding machine.

Why we didn’t put the cards in the computer in the first place is something I never found out. I asked Mr. Killingsworth, a sour little man, about it one day, and he explained, “I don’t know.”

Anyway, now we come to do not fold, staple, or mutilate your loan-payment card. If a card had a staple in it, the card with the staple would upset the computer, which would begin eating all the cards. If the card was folded or otherwise mutilated, it would also upset the computer, which would begin eating all the cards. What I would be left with was a lot of loan-payment cards torn to shreds, which meant I had to go back upstairs and punch out new cards, which was a helluva lot of trouble.

I had a couple of other jobs before this one. I sacked groceries for one dollar an hour. I worked with one of those companies that put up shell homes—“a dollar and a deed is all you need.” I scraped paint off windows and helped two guys named Marcus and Willie dig up stumps in the yards. I got five dollars a day for that.

None of those jobs was very much fun, but I never came to hate them the way I came to hate my job at the First National Bank, dealing with dingbats and chewed-up loan-payment cards.

On top of everything I’ve mentioned so far, there was the matter of the organization chart, which was on the wall in the loan-payment department for everybody to see.

Mr. Killingsworth was on top of the chart. Next came his assistants, and so on. On the very bottom of the chart was my name alongside Harvey’s. It’s one thing to know you are scum and dirt and whale dung, but it is quite another to have to look at it and have others see it on a big chart—every single day.

What retained my sanity for me, of course, was the fact that come September, I was gone. I would tell Mr. Killingsworth what he could do with his checks and stapled payment cards and I would be out of there, leaving the others to torment and doom.

What else helped was that life outside the office was wonderful. Ronnie and I hadn’t been mugged in the neighborhood, Paula and I had graduated into another level of romance. And we had found a place to buy beer where they didn’t check your ID.

And I would soon be the recipient of an incredible break. From the bad start at the newspaper, from my three hours as a walking encyclopedia salesman, from dingbats who would round off their checks and staple them to their loan-payment cards. I would meet a man, and he would put in motion how I got from the summer of ’64 to the spring of ’77, where this adventure is ultimately headed.

“Balls,” cried the queen. “If I had ’em I’d be king.”

—An old expression regarding courage.