I Was a Fuller Brush Man

Daddy thought I needed a job, and he had been a traveling salesman himself in his youth, so when he saw the job ad in the newspaper, he urged me to apply. I now believe he thought character was built by suffering.

Since I had delivered newspapers by bicycle from the ages of 13 to 17 and was used to working a route while earning almost no money, selling Fuller Brush door-to-door sounded like the perfect job.

I was right not to expect much pay. I think my entire summer’s work brought in only around $400. The company name, Fuller Brush, was sometimes a help since they’d earned the reputation that their brushes would last 10 years or longer, but it was often an impediment since when I introduced myself as their Fuller Brush salesman, many would say, “We don’t need any brushes.” I’d quickly start pointing out that we also had whole lines of brooms, mops, cleaning products and—but often the door was closed before I could finish my sentence.

When people go to a store, they are looking to buy. When a salesman shows up on their doorstep, not so much.

Despite all the challenges of selling to resistant customers, the hardest part of the job for me was picking up my orders. You see, the newspaper ad that I answered had not been placed by the company but by a Fuller Brush salesman (whom I’ll call C. T. Jones) who lived in the same town. When my order came in, I picked it up at his house, which should’ve taken no more than 5 minutes, but which actually never took less than an hour. That’s because C. T. Jones was a compulsive talker, and there was no polite way to leave while he was earnestly bending my ear. But that wasn’t the worst of it. His wife and 2 children were also compulsive talkers.

In ordinary conversations, the people talking to you periodically pause or at least stop to take a breath once in a while, giving you an opportunity to respond or at least to quickly say goodbye. There was no such opportunity with the Jones family. You know how you can play the harmonica while never stopping to take a breath by blowing on the exhale and sucking on the inhale? The Joneses had developed a similar technique for non-stop talking.

I’m going to go ahead and answer 2 questions you might have: 1) What happens when 4 compulsive talkers are in the same room with you, their captive audience? and 2) how do they never run out of things to say? The answer to the first question is that it gets deafeningly loud and befuddling. Since all 4 Joneses wanted to be heard, each one competed to out-loud the other three. Each entreated my attention, resulting in non-stop noxious noise, a cacophony of confusion, a Bedlam of bafflement. The answer to the second question (about never running out of things to say) is that for a compulsive talker, every conversation becomes a topic for the next one. So Mrs. Jones, for example, would start most sentences with “As I was telling somebody this morning” or “As I was saying to Sadie yesterday on the phone.” I imagine as soon as I left, she called a neighbor and said, “As I was just saying to that pitiful salesman C.T. recruited.” This technique created a Mobius strip of chatter, a perpetual commotion machine, an endlessly looping tape of talk. People weren’t referring to a room when they remarked on the C. T. Jones house’s din.

I learned a lot from that job. What I mainly learned is—I didn’t want to be a salesman.

But in the process of doing it, I like to think I grew—grew from being a paper boy to being a fuller man.

(My thanks to Wildacres Retreat, where this essay was written.)