This is part 2 of a 2-part series. Start from the beginning with The Cable Guy: The Grind of Door-to-Door Sales (Part I)

Here I am: Boston, NY, the overwhelmingly white outer-outer suburb, tucked in the deep forest of Erie County where the land starts to just barely rise into the foothills of the Catskills. I am outside without an umbrella and there is a flash flood. I have a rain jacket on, but that only saves my torso; my socks, my pants, and my lead sheet are all soaked. I’m standing under the branches of a pine tree, trying to read the next house on the sheet, but the paper crumbles in my hands, rendering it unreadable.

The rain was so heavy and thick that it blinded me just walking through it. I had already gone to a few houses, but talking to someone with half your face cloaked in a hood to keep the rain away, like I’m some street rat with a shank in his pocket, happens to be a turnoff for most people, so I kept to waiting the storm out under that tree.

The harder the rain falls, the faster it disappears, and this storm did not deviate from this rule. At one moment, the rain fell as if an ocean was flipped above us and was crashing back down; then, it stopped, with one single after-fall, like a dog shaking the last bit of moisture from its fur, and it was gone. The air hung heavily with humidity. I said to myself, “Fuck this,” and set out.

Boston, NY is pure Trump country, as one resident told me while I tried selling him our triple play plan. He asked me where I was from: “Albany,” I said, to which he replied: “Ah, I see. Albany. Some of you guys come ‘round here and I ask them where they’re from and they say ‘the city.’ God help us. You know any of your guys bein’ from the city?” I shrugged and said a few were, to my vague recollection. “Damn shame.” He said. “Bet they voted for that crooked Hillary, huh?”

My mind shut off at that point. I just tried to make the sale. He went on about more-or-less what you’d expect him to go on about, with that “us v. them” bent that destroys so many minds.

He asked if there are “a lot of Jews” in Albany, and I was sort of done with this conversation before it even started, already taking mental steps back down the driveway, so I said, “Sure, why not?” and he replied back, “Well, how do you know for sure?” I asked, “Is that a rhetorical question, or…” and all he said in return was, “Well, make ‘em pull down their pants and look at their dicks.” He wasn’t buying. He gave me a pat on the back, telling me I was a “solid one,” and I left with no chance of getting that time back.

Most people in the area weren’t quite so looney. Most people were retired, living on huge estates, McMansions in the middle of several acres of grass; or smaller, shack-like homes purposely hidden behind several layers of trees. There were a lot of Vietnam vets with POW/MIA flags and cattle dogs barking and yipping from behind glass doors; ex-surgeons who operated in the age before ultrasound and CT scans; and people with eyes so cold and faces so devoid of history that it was impossible to figure out who they were or where they’d been. These were the people who told you nothing, who answered the door and just looked right through you as you spoke. Those I did talk to always wanted Fox News, and some of them even the obscure Ontario channels. I had to explain to a few elderly women what email was before realizing that I was wasting my time and had to move on.

Most of the people I met here were sweet, too old and experienced to be worked up or bothered by my presence, and fairly welcoming in a middle-America sort of way, if not a bit shut in. I never applied that AIR principle nonsense; I stated my case, told them what I was offering, and if they said no, I’d be on my way. And the thing was, they always waved me away with a smile. When I was still in training, an overwhelming majority of people were borderline hostile because we would push too hard. But with nobody watching over me, I went about this selling business my own way, not too concerned if I missed out on one or two sales by not “taking the shot”: it just wasn’t worth selling part of my soul for that.

I went to this neighborhood only twice, and I only made one sale. So be it. I went the distance I was willing to and I knew the financial sacrifices I was making. These things weren’t beyond me.

I spent another day in East Aurora, which amounted to flat corn fields and barely forty houses, each house spaced approximately a fifth of a mile from one another. That day was hot and consumed by walking, mostly along the low shoulder of the highway, where cars zipped by at 65 mph. If you’ve ever been to an open field and looked at the expanse of it and thought, “Really, this is it?” you know what East Aurora looks like. The only exceptional thing I did there was piss behind a warehouse after holding it in for three hours. When I walked away, a rugged looking worker gave me a quizzical look as he walked past me in the gravel front of the warehouse.

When he looked at me I flashed my work badge and said, “Don’t worry, I’m with ___,” as if that were an answer to something, and walked along to my next house.

The rest of my time was spent in Hamburg, which is about a forty-minute drive from the office. Every time Patrick (“Yo, hep cat”) said we were going there, a gear inside me would stop turning because I knew that meant getting back to the office at 10:00 pm and not getting home until well after 10:30 pm. I started switching on and off with Amir for driving the gang to their respective neighborhoods until I had adopted the driver role completely by the middle of the third week.

Hamburg sits along Lake Erie, so with that kind of real estate, there are quite a few wealthy sections of suburbs. That being said, there are also a fair share of middle-to-lower income areas as well. However, Hamburg being roughly 98% white, those impoverished areas were not “lower income” in the East Buffalo sense; more so in the backwoods, Confederate flag flavor. These, I’ll call them “traditionalist,” houses always seemed to have a borderline mangy dog tied to a tree who always lunged at me upon my approach, chocking itself up onto its two hind legs and never ceasing to gnaw at the air in front of its nose. Often, there would be detached garages with those rebel flags waving overhead, and the front doors would be opened by shirtless, sweaty men, their eyes glazed over in a tired, almost detached haze. They would either immediately tell me to “Get off my porch” with a harsh tone of indignation, or they would listen for a moment, stop me, and then tell me to “Get off my porch” in a comparatively harsher tone of not indignation but offense.

These areas were far outnumbered by the upper-class neighborhoods, however. More McMansions, except not nearly as spaced out as in East Aurora or Boston. There was a level of suspicion that many people exhibited here that was similar in intensity to what I experienced in Aurora. Some people were mildly ticked off, others were in that mid-level of annoyance, but a few people even pled, cried out to me, to “STOP COMING TO MY HOUSE!” on the verge of tears. “PLEASE, PLEASE, JUST STOP IT! NO MORE!”

I was a brick wall. “No problem, have a nice day,” and I’d leave. Inside, I was no longer stunned by these things; I was just so completely numb to these outbursts at this point. But I wasn’t numb in a stronger, more enforced way; all the feeling inside me had just been killed off, scorched to death. I was the walking embodiment of “a lack of empathy.” I would not meet these people’s callousness with my own outburst; I would just take it with a silicone-smile and quietly wish upon them a burst pipe or a productive tumble down a staircase.

But there was one instance where I almost lashed out. It was with this seven-foot-tall man who looked to just qualify for Medicare. Before I got my name out, the man just said, “No.” I didn’t think this was fair, as he didn’t even know what I had to offer yet, so I said, trying to keep it light, “But you don’t even know what I’m here for.”

Then he chuckled and said, “No” once more. But the chuckle and that one word were both injected with so much self-righteousness and cocksure superiority that it felt like the ground was ripped out from under me. He hadn’t disarmed me; he had simply punched me in the chest.

I still kept my cool, already turning my feet around to leave as I began to say, “Alright, sorry to—” Before I finished, he laughed again, and said, “Screw off,” still with that same level of conceitedness and a shit-eating grin to boot.

I froze. My heart was suddenly heavy as concrete. I glared up at him and he grinned down at me. I opened my mouth, enough to make my teeth visible, and was prepared to say, “Fuck you too, jag-off; hope you have a shit day,” but I caught myself. Ooh, how I almost let it slip, though. I rarely ever reach that point of boiling over, but all the elements in his delivery and physical being caught me at all the wrong angles, and I was so close to saying it. It was clear he attained from his height a greater-than-thou sense of himself, and that without his height, he would be timid and worthless.

I had so much hatred in me, but I held it in as I walked away. It took me the rest of the day to breathe the fire out of my lungs.

The whole tired charade went on and on. I got rejected hundreds of more times. I tried introducing myself to those standing on their lawns, but they made sure to divert their eyes from me, even though they could clearly hear me. Every lawn was manicured; no, pedicured. I walked around those streets and the word “castrated” kept scrolling through my thoughts in newspaper type-print. There was no spirit there. It felt like purgatory, a blank, white-walled waiting room for lost souls.

After work, every night, my whole body deflated. Whatever indifference I harbored during the work day came crashing down in place of existential disorientation and self-pity. Not only did I believe what I was doing was pointless, but that it was detrimental to society, that I was one of the detractors from it. I would make a sale here and there, sure, but at what cost to myself? I felt tainted to the core. Perhaps I’m being dramatic, I would consider. But why then do these thoughts appear so dire in my head? Why do I have the feeling that disaster will befall me?

I would have trouble sleeping some nights for no reason I could understand. One night, I received a message from Hanne from Norway, and we spoke for about three hours. She had moved to a different city and got a job in her field. Things were going well for her. I explained to her what my job was, and she said it sounded “cool,” though it was obvious she only said this because she was my friend, because she wanted to support me with anything I chose to do.

I wished I could hug her through the phone. Something was terribly wrong with where I was and what I was doing, but I tried not to let any of that appear evident. I had forgotten the importance of friendship from working this job. Speaking to Hanne reminded me of it and all the other good things in the world, but also how far away those things were from me. Our talk meant more to me than she could ever comprehend. We ended our talk with the implication that there was more to come—more to chatting, more to our careers, more to life—which settled my thoughts enough to allow for sleep.

Now I was about three weeks in, and I was hanging from a rope whose fibers were untwisting and urging to snap. I felt I could not relate to anybody I was surrounded by. I made conversation and chuckled on cue at jokes, but it was all sociopathic and contrived. I was simply trying to blend in. I had thoughts of houses on fire, car crashes on the street, gunmen with their sights locked on me from second story windows, I—

“Alright, I need all the leaders in my office, and everyone else—get promoted.”

It was 90 degrees and humid out that day. All Sam did for us was toss us each a bottle of Gatorade and write “Stay Hydrated” double-underlined on the whiteboard. I didn’t want to quit. I’m not a quitter, dammit. Men of less went through more than this. This isn’t a big deal, I thought, naïve enough to truly think so. Today will be fine.

But the day was Floridian in its swampiness, and it was only going to get worse throughout the following week when a dangerous heat wave was supposed to pass through the Midwest and Northeast. I had brought six bottles of water in a backpack, plus the Gatorade, and drank all of them within half an hour. Then I was at the mercy of the homeowners to give me water.

There isn’t an embarrassment quite like being told to screw off after trying to pitch cable, and then having to ask if they could give you some water. I tried to apply reciprocity in my pitches wherever I could, so they wouldn’t refuse getting me some water, but it all felt phony and half-hearted. They often went and fetched me some water no matter what, though, if only to keep this kid from dropping from heat stroke on their doorstep.

The heat was getting too unbearable. I sat on the edge of the sidewalk, under some shade, and just thought. Thought, only in the sense that my mind was someplace else. I was looking through a vacuum.

A woman walking her dog passed behind me and asked as she walked, “Tough day, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, without any air in it. “Hey, you want some wicked fast internet?”

She chuckled and said, “No thanks; I want no part in that war,” then walked off down the street.

I spent the last hour of that day sitting under some wider shade, falling asleep, right in front of the sign that marked the neighborhood for incomers. I picked Amir up promptly at eight, then headed with him to fetch Patrick. He was still in a house making a sale, so I just parked out in front of the house and let the AC run.

We both knew it was going to be a while. Amir got out to smoke a cigarette, then stomped it out and sat back in when the heat finally got to him. We got to talking about the heat and why we were both working this job, and as we talked, I was getting signs that there was regret in his decision for taking it, as he was also working under that internship banner, just like me. So I asked him:

“Didn’t they make it sound like an office job?”

His entire face lit up. “Holy shit, dude, yes!” We tore into each other and concluded that we both had the same understanding of what this job was going to be when we first started—an office job, developing marketing campaigns, with only occasional forays out of the office to meet directly with clients.

“Yo, I feel kind of lied to,” he said. “They played us dirty.”

“Yeah,” I said back. “I feel the same way.”

“But you can’t really talk about it to anyone else. They’d, like, turn on you, I feel.”

“Maybe.”

“Like I wouldn’t tell Patrick this.”

“No.”

“I thought I was the only one who thought this.”

“Me too.”

“Well shit.”

“Ditto.”

Then Patrick walked out of the house and got into the car. There was a comfort within me and Amir from confirming a sneaking suspicion between us, but in Amir, there was a new element to his expression that showed clearly: hopelessness. From knowing truly that what was implicated did not reflect reality, the whole situation appeared only more wretched in Amir’s eyes. Neither of us told Patrick, nor anyone else, of our conversation.

The weekend came. The heat was only worse now. The landlady refused to put the AC on in the house, and my head was beginning to throb, then pierce, then implode. Then the pain filled my head completely and overflowed into my stomach, where nausea began to swell. I drank as much water as my body could retain, but I felt I was dying all the same. I drove out to Target where I stumbled in, bleary and disoriented, and bought a little bottle of painkillers. Before I even left the store, I popped three of those little tablets into my mouth and swallowed them dry. I checked the temperature on my phone: 96, 65% humidity. This heat wave wasn’t going to end until the next week over and was supposed to reach triple digits for most of that week.

I hurried over to the Barnes & Noble down the street, leaving my car where it was, and rushed inside, shocked by the sudden 50 degree drop in temperature. I went to the historical fiction section, took a random book off the shelf, and sat reading in the Starbucks section for over three hours. There were a group of deep-voiced African Americans playing a competitive chess game, with a dozen people orbiting them, looking onward in awe. “Oh, now that was clandestine right there. You done misjudged the nature of this game, though. You ain’t gonna work me ‘round that way.”

They had everybody, including me, laughing at their sly back-and-forth. Two games got started, and everyone got a chance to play. But I didn’t play. I just sat back and watched—and thought. Yes, more thinking. More thoughts of dread and how the weather was going to be in the coming week. I was genuinely afraid of what might happen. I started to tremble. I hadn’t felt quite so far away from everything as I did in that Barnes & Noble that weekend.

I called my mother and poured everything out. She pleaded for me to come home. I called my father, who was visiting my aunt in the City, and he said I should come home too, and my aunt, overhearing the conversation, cried out from the background, “Oh my God, quit that awful job!” I ended both calls with a sense of dissolution. I sat there completely still for a while. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I would go in on Monday and see how things went.

On my last day, I drove the normal group out to Hamburg, then parked my car beside a Korean restaurant and let the AC run for a moment before turning off the car. It was sweltering, Southeastern Asian jungle weather. I started my route and completed my first lap, and—something gave.

I stopped walking and couldn’t move. I couldn’t move because I fully actualized the futility of what I was doing and I had finally made my decision: I was going to quit today.

I walked on autopilot back to my car, cranked the AC, and read my book for the next five hours. I didn’t care. No part of my being did. Patrick called me around five and asked me how things were going, and I said fine, that I just completed my second lap, and that I would keep hitting the pavement. A lie without remorse. This time, I didn’t feel dirty from it. I felt totally free.

At the end of the day, I picked everyone up and got us back to the office by nine. I didn’t let one hint slip of my idle day the whole way back. Inside the office, on the whiteboard, Patrick started drawing up a graph to record the number of sales of each other car members. I was just waiting to speak to Sam. Amir and Kyle rattled off their numbers, and Patrick recorded his own, and when it was my turn, I saw through the hallway that Sam was alone in his office, so I excused myself without giving Patrick my number—zero.

“Sam,” I said, with as much authority as I could muster. “I need to talk to you.”

He perked up, but only a little. “Sure,” he said. “Something’s troubling you, obviously.”

“Yes, I think there is.”

“Alright. What’s up?”

“What is the major specific project I was told about?”

“What project?”

I pulled out the paperwork with the job description on it.

“Oh,” he said. “I was going to send you to Pittsburgh. Or Boston. To work a new market.”

“So the same thing as I’m doing here.”

“Well…”

I asked him about the accounting work, another aspect of this job that was promised.

“That’s just to keep track of the tablets,” he said, not even trying to put it delicately. “Counting the company jackets in the closet.”

All I saw then was fractured glass. I laid it out: this job wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, that I put in my all but all I got out of it was a broken spirit, and that I needed to quit, tonight.

He took a moment to ingest this. Then he clarified: “You thought this was an office job?”

I wanted to scream, Yes, yes, fucking YES!” but I held it back. “That’s right,” I said. “That’s what I understood it to be.”

“Well, that’s not what it was.”

No shit. “I know that now.”

“Then why did you stay this long?”

“Honestly, because I already put down my rent deposit.”

He mulled this over too.

“Okay,” he said. “I understand. I do—”

A boy’s head poked into the office; a head attached to a suit. “Just want to let you know I’m here.”

“Sure thing, buddy, I’ll get you in a bit.”

The head disappeared. I tried to convince myself that wasn’t what I thought it was.

Sam turned his attention back to me. “I’m surprised, honestly. You were getting good at this job. Adam and Patrick spoke highly of you.”

“Well, I tried my best, I’ll say that.”

“I understand. But I mean, if you think you can do something more productive with your summer, then I understand. I know it’s nothing personal; it’s just business.” Then he held out his hand for me to shake, and I shook it. He said if I ever need a recommendation that he’ll provide a glowing one. I walked out with him grinning.

I walked back into the main room where Patrick was and stood in front of him.

“Hey,” he said. “So, how many sales did you get?”

I was about to say it there, but instead, I led him out into the hallway, where that kid was walking into Sam’s office.

“I just quit,” I said.

It didn’t register with him at first. His face was frozen, then twitched, then froze again.

“Wait, what?”

“I quit. It wasn’t you, it wasn’t anybody; I just quit.”

I tried explaining it to him, but it didn’t click completely, so I gave it up. He was saddened by my leaving. I respected Patrick. He was one of the only few I felt a human connection with in the office, as morbid as that sounds. I saw inside Sam’s office that Sam and the boy were shaking hands, the word “welcome” mouthing on Sam’s lips. I turned away, wished Patrick well, giving him a hug he wasn’t quite prepared for, and went out to my car.

I felt as if I had broken up with somebody; black spots in my eyes, my ears compressed and ringing, and the feeling that I had just skipped ten minutes of my life.

All I was able to think was, “What just happened?” I stood beside my car and breathed in the air. It had cooled to an even 70 in the late dusk and was quite comfortable. I waited for Adam and his car to pull in. When it did and the group of them started for the office entrance, I pulled Adam aside and updated him on my leaving. He was saddened by this, too, but in a more calculated, professional way. He didn’t let the sadness get into his voice, but it did seep into the gleam of his eyes.

“That’s too bad,” he said. “I hate to see you go. But you gotta do what you gotta do. You were a good one. Good seein’ ya.” He gave me a clasp on the back and walked inside. I considered going back in to tell Amir of my quitting, but for some reason I didn’t. I just got in my car and left. I drove Northeast into the sunset, pink and burning, everything black against it. I left Buffalo the next morning.

“How do you want the top? Leave a little curl in it?”

She’s buzzed off both sides of my head and has left the top untouched, making my hair appear bush-like.

“No,” I say. “Shave it off.”

“You want me to shave it off?”

“Yes. Uniform buzz.”

She starts going to town with the razor. This is a look I’ve never had before. Something about getting it, I feel, will be transformative, either in the haircut itself or in its reflection of the experience of the last few weeks.

As she buzzed away, I told her about my job, how I quit, and how I didn’t even make money out of it: I lost about $600 from the venture.

“Jesus,” she said.

“Well, a drop in the bucket,” I said, not really believing it.

“Well,” she said. “At least you had the sense to quit. You had a line you wouldn’t cross. A lot of people are willing to cross it, and then everything gets ruined that way.” She paused a moment. “Good thing you’re one of the moral ones.”

Something sounded absurd about that. I wanted to ask her where the morality was inside me. Somewhere, the system was jammed.

“Stay behind that line,” she said, “and life’ll be okay.”

Was it that simple? I thought it was, but then that thought was stomped out of me. But I had heard it. I heard it just now, and I had heard it long ago, which made me believe it in the first place.

“Okay,” I said. “I hope so.”