“As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”
Blake, Glengarry Glen Ross
Can you trust a sales manager who hasn’t seen Glengarry Glen Ross? Doesn’t even know what it is?
But it wasn’t a matter of quotas, targets, or prospects. It was making pebbles out of a boulder with a scalpel. You are a desperate man starting over.
“But please just let me get the job,” you pray like an atheist in a foxhole. You had tried, you really had. Yoga, meditation, bird walks, volunteering, stand-up comedy, stand-up comedy! Dating, abstinence, forgiveness, self-love (too much?), anti-gun rallies, pro-gun rallies, rainbow flag rallies, deep bows to all Four Directions for all you weren’t.
“You’ve seen it right?”
“What?”
“Glengarry Glen Ross?”
“No. What is that a movie?”
Just hang in there. Remember what it is like to be loved. Remember what it is like to love.
Life is a mess. And now you want to drink again. You can handle redemption now. Finally. And no one would have to know. One way or the other. Sometimes you just want to drive up on 81 North, get out of the car, drop a brick on the accelerator and walk into a field. A field of tall golden stalks of grass. You feel the stalks’ warmth and lay down in it. You get shit-faced drunk and sleep in their warmth. The aroma of sedge quilting the length of your body. You.
“Yeah, it’s a movie. Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Al Pacino.”
“Love Jack Lemmon. Grumpy Old Men is a classic. And that Ann Margaret…”
Holy shit! You think the world has come off its axis… Are you going crazy? There was no question about it.
And you have no one. What would it matter? So much of our lives are the past, just a fraction is the present. The future? It’s for suckers. And dreamers. Same difference.
You are asking to work in sales for a guy who didn’t know Glengarry Glen Ross. And he is three years younger than you by figuring out his LinkedIn profile. But who knows? Maybe it took him six years to get through three schools like you. Maybe not.
The damp earth soaks into your clothes. Mushroom. Cistern. Leach. Words pop like corn kernels in your brain. Breaths cling to your lungs in small beads like moonlight reflected in raindrops caught in a spider’s web spanned between a downspout and the corner of a house where you once had lived. Possibly married. Obviously divorced.
You lay in that field as the day turns the fecund ground over you and crows fly from left to right like “muscae volitantes.” You have been seeing them for years and finally, in a Kawabata short story, you think it was, you learned their name. All those years it took to get to that field, drunk, again, staring and seeing the small proteins crumbling and flying away from your sight. Far away. Upwind. Like birds. Or something burning.
