I've seen three pretty good salesmen in my life. First one’s sales job at Johnson County, Iowa’s jail on July 4 and 5 of many years ago, I don’t want to get into why I was there. They were packing us in so tight we had to sleep with our heads touching our feet on foam pads. By day two, just after our discharge process was lingering into the afternoon and with the hangovers starting to be felt, the inmates began getting edgy. In our company was a man of no distinction, fat belly weighing him down and after a little while he bopped up and said “Do you know how to knock out a burglar alarm with aluminum foil? Wanna learn how to cook meth without fertilizer? Do you know there’s a way you can open a squad car door from the inside?” Soon, almost all the prisoners in the jail were around him like children at story time, listening attentively as he spoke of his interpretations of criminal activities. Maybe he was making the whole thing up as he spoke; a man lying on the floor next to me, his arm over his eyes, kept saying in low tones things like that’s not true, uh-huh, or that’s a great way to burn down your house. But it only made me respect him more; only through pure bluffing had he established himself as the leader.
A good salesman is instantly identifiable to me. I was even the number one telemarketer in the country if only for a brief period. I can’t prove this–that was about 20 years ago and I didn’t keep any of my “top seller” certificates or the daily sales reports that said I was already 350 percent of my weekly quota by Tuesday afternoon–but my company at that time had one of the largest telemarketing divisions in the world. There were other weeks, too, when the number-one salesperson across the entire company was yours truly. Believe it or not, there’s no way to create such a story that is flattering–or humiliating, for that matter. Who brags about telemarketing! That would be like coming out and telling everyone you had gonorrhea.

It is strange how completely I had ignored this chapter of my life for so many years-just as one might “forget”-or perhaps the right term is repress- some disastrous relationships, or unfortunate haircuts. All came flooding back recently after watching the HBO docuseries Telemarketers. The environment will be instantly recognizable if you have ever been on the other end of a telemarketing pitch: that dimly lit office building with low ceilings at the outskirts of town, the empty liquor bottles stacked in the men’s room, a time capsule representing a world that faded away almost without notice. You might catch a glimpse of your reflection in those grainy, poorly dubbed VHS clips. Another you sinking into a cushioned cubicle adage’s varnished gentlemanly retirement bleeds away as though mutely mourning in speechless defeat behind an ageist projectile apoplectic hospital administrator-blackjack player. It was the Y2K-era midpoint—a time when salespeople still personally visited one’s home, versus today’s creepy A.I.-driven robocalls-the last years before American gullibility (and disposable income) was pretty much depleted by post-9/11 disillusionment, the emergence of the Internet, an economy that just seemed to limp from one crisis to another, and, of course, small-time fraudsters like me, the backbone of this great country.