A Good Day's Work (29 page)

“A Canon P-23?”

“Yep. The paper won't go through.”

“I'll bring it this week,” he says.

Then back in the van and across town to another grocery store. In a second-floor office Raymond and Robbie—two sturdy fellows in their thirties who look like they should be in buckskins out fording a river somewhere—peer glumly into the screens of desktop computers. Steve's arrival lightens their mood. For a few minutes they kibitz about something called “Bikes in the Bay,” which turns out to be the local motorcycle festival. Somewhere in the conversation Steve reminds them that if they want their regular ad in the
Equity
's Pontiac Travel Guide they will have to commit soon. For good measure he hits them up for thirty dozen hamburger patties and twenty dozen hot dogs for the
Equity
's annual summer picnic.

Steve's exit route takes him down some back stairs and through the butcher shop, where a thick-bodied guy in a hard
hat and blood-smeared white coat hacks at meat. Half-assed insults are exchanged: nobody is getting better looking or, from the sounds of it, any thinner. When Steve tells him about the store's picnic commitment, the butcher, whose name turns out to be Rennie, writes on a chalkboard: “Steve, 30 dozen patties, 20 dozen hot dogs June 30 The Equity.”

Steve pulls up in front of the local youth employment centre. “Sometimes I get an order here, but usually it's waiting on the fax machine for me back at the office,” he says. Today they want two packets of 8½ × 14-inch printer paper. He sticks his head inside the office at the local elementary school (“Nothing today.”) and a food bank in the same brick building (“I think we're good.”). The two sisters who run Kluke Snack—a narrow, elongated old-style diner—want to do some business. Back in the car, he repeats their order into his recorder: a bottle of Merlin cleaner for their fryer and grills. It retails for $9.95.

Sales folks, it has been my personal experience, are inattentive drivers: they're always illegally texting, talking to a customer on Bluetooth or mentally calculating a commission. They're usually running late. Steve is different. He drives within the speed limit, with both hands on the wheel. As we drive, he talks. Not in a wearying oh-my-god-let's-not-leave-a-second-of-dead-air manner. He makes friends with the pauses. He keeps his eyes on the road, as befitting a man who has seen many things and whose abiding principle is “every day you go to work you never know what is going to happen.”

Steve had options when he graduated from Woodroffe High School: he could have joined the Mounties or the fire department. Instead, he opted for Art Forbes Enterprises,
which his father formed after retail giant Dylex took over John Forsyth Shirts and axed the sales staff. Steve spent the next fifteen years selling Bench Craft leather belts from Kitchener, Ontario, along with trousers made by Rothstein Pants, and swimsuits, robes and pyjamas made by Majestic Industries, both of Montreal.

He and Art travelled together in his father's big Buick Estate wagon, then an Electra 225, finally a Pontiac Parisienne. They threw their samples into grips. They placed the bulky suitcases in the trunk—unlike a lot of travelling salesmen, who took out the back seat of the car and replaced it with a piece of plywood for storing samples—and then hit the road. Through the hick towns of eastern Ontario and the mostly English townships of western Quebec they drove. In a cloud of spinning gravel, they'd wheel into places named Arnprior, Renfrew, Deep River, Pembroke, Brockville, Kingston and Belleville and hump their goods into men's stores that had stood there for generations. “[When I was] growing up, Father was away a lot,” Steve says. “I hated the day he was leaving. But over the years we grew very close. We were more like brothers than father and son. When he died, I lost my best friend and my father in a single day.”

Travelling with Art, Steve watched, listened and learned. From the age of twelve on Steve had been copying out and memorizing his dad's motto: “Good, better, best: I will never rest till my good is better and my better best.” As they worked together, Art taught him other things: “The customer isn't always number one,” for starters. But also that “if a customer has more than three sock companies on the rack, you will have only trouble getting paid,” since the store owner clearly can't
say no to a salesman even if they don't really think they can move the merchandise. He counselled Steve to trust his own judgment when deciding what merchandise to show customers. (“You may have a shirt in fifty colours and stripe combinations. Pick out the ones you like. Show them to the customer and you'll build a trust and rapport with them.”) Some of things he urged were self-evident: “Don't ever slam a door, because you never know when it will open again” and “Don't try to sell your product by talking down the competition.” When he told Steve to “always be closing,” his father meant that you need to be always closing in on the next step in the sales process.

Art knew the dangers of overselling. Every Christmas he sent blocks of Black Diamond cheddar cheese to their customers. He never sent booze for the simple reason that if a bottle of Canadian Club rye arrived at a customer's place of business, it would almost never make it to their home unopened. The customer, instead, would arrive half in the bag and late on Christmas Eve. The wife would blame it on Art Forbes and Associates. Next thing you knew a competitor would have the business.

Together Art and Steve spent fifty weeks a year on the road, taking orders, prospecting for new clients and keeping existing accounts happy. “I was in town,” Steve would say to customers when he finally got on his own, “and I just wanted to drop in because I had few things I thought you would like to see.” Like his father before him, he would unsnap his grip and, as if unveiling a saint's relics, drape a shirt or tie over his arm for the owner's discerning gaze. Orders would be scribbled down for transcription back at the office. Then, on to the next customer, often a few miles down the highway.

Sometimes clients would come into the office in Ottawa to see samples. The Forbes boys would set up booths at trade shows. A few times a year they made their way across town to sell to the procurement guy who supplied the Canadian forces bases in Canada, Bermuda and West Germany. Spring, fall and late summer Steve and Art packed up their grips and boarded a plane for the Caribbean. They checked into the Elbow Beach Surf Club in Bermuda—where the seventies potboiler
The Deep
was filmed—or the Astra Suites in Barbados or the Grand Bahama Hotel on Grand Bahama Island. Sometimes they had a sample room where they could put their clothes on display. Mostly they visited clients: Leo Custodio and Charles Dickens in Bermuda, Michael Lambert in Barbados and Pat Paul in Nassau. “I used to try and get all business done in the first couple of days,” Steve recalls. “I would get there on Tuesday and make appointments for Wednesday. Then Thursday, Friday and Saturday you could put your grips away and relax.” Some 45 percent of their annual sales came from the islands. When their Caribbean customers travelled to Canada, the Forbes boys ensured that they stayed at the stately Rothstein residence in Mount Royal and received a tour of the factories that made the merchandise they sold in their stores.

For fifteen years they worked together. When Art retired in 1988, Steve discovered that the business was changing. All of a sudden the big manufacturers like Dylex were charging for samples: on a four-thousand-dollar commission Steve had to cough up five figures for the shirts, pants, underwear, jackets and ties that were his main sales props. No such concerns weighed on him in the job he took next: selling Wonder Bras throughout the Ottawa Valley. “In sales you sell yourself,” says
Steve. “Bras are a different product that ties and belts. But in the end it is just the same thing.”

Steve would leave on Sunday night and return on Friday. He would spend Saturday checking invoices. Then on Sunday he would do it all again. He was only forty, but had spent too many of those years on the road and was sick of so much time alone in motels, eating heart-stopping poutine and watching the Canadiens play on fuzzy TV screens. He took a job that allowed him to finish each day at home near Ottawa: selling towels, linens, toilet paper, garbage bags and floor stripper to motels along the St. Lawrence Seaway. When that outfit was taken over, Steve found work selling chemicals and, later, a job in Quebec's Pontiac County, where the Forbes clan had long owned a cottage, peddling office products. For fourteen years he commuted back and forth to Ottawa. Then he met Anne. By the time Steve's employer got in trouble and had to lay him off the Pontiac had become home. He says, “I left that job on a Friday. On Tuesday I started work at the
Equity
.”

THERE'S not a lot of customer turnover in the Pontiac. People tend to be lifers who've never left or retirees uninterested in opening up a business in a small, rural market. Steve sells all things to all customers because there's no other way to make a buck in the work he has chosen in the place he wants to be. Consequently one minute he's talking stationery with the suits at the local insurance company or fax paper with the receptionist at a doctor's office and the next he's stepping inside the CPM Service Station where the regulars have assembled:
John Lunam, known as “McGill” because that's where he attended university; “Doc” Chrétien, a dentist; “NASCAR,” the racing buff; and Noel, “the Mechanic,” who, naturally, owns the place.

Once a week they convene there at noon and eat lunch around the wood stove at the back of the service station. It's one of those male environments where the ritual of a well-turned insult is more valued than expressing “one's feelings.” Steve sits down, puts his feet up and lets the minutes tick by. Technically it's work, since he sells Noel various cleaners, fluids and other stuff. Yet I get the undeniable impression that Steve would do what he does—the daily rounds, the schmoozing and the passing of gossip—free. He is a travelling salesman in the age of Amazon and eBay. For now, he's like those old-time peddlers, the chime of bells heralding their eternally optimistic arrival over the hilltop.

In Ladysmith—home to Catholic Irish and Lutheran Germans—we lunch at a customer's bar in the town's sole hotel. Then we light out cross-country for Bristol, his hometown, and the metal hangar that houses Bristol Marine, a boat repair shop. The proprietor, Brent Orr, is tall and wide, with alert blue eyes and white hair bisected with a neat side part. Since Brent also happens to be Bristol's mayor, they talk municipal politics for a couple of minutes. His Worship doesn't need any hand cleaner, toilet paper, paper towels or stationery today. So Steve is soon on his way, heading back past Shawville to Quyon, a little port on the Ottawa River.

We drive around for a bit, taking in the ferry, the fabled Shamrock Bar at Gavan's Hotel and some of the other sites, until we park across the street from a stone Anglican Church.
“I want you to meet someone,” he tells me, getting out and walking back down Clarendon Street. “Hellooo, Mae,” Steve says. A straight-backed woman with a tight head of white curls, glasses and an apron says hi but keeps moving. Mae McCann, seventy-five, has been serving poutine, burgers, hot dogs, egg rolls and fries on that spot since 1969. “He's a good lad,” she says of Steve, who has been supplying her with grill cleaner, bill pads, calculator rolls, disinfectant, paper towels and toilet paper for more years than he can say. “You can count on him.”

It's three-ish as we head back toward Shawville, so what the heck: Steve cuts the wheel and crunches gravel up the long driveway to R.H. Nugent Equipment Rentals, where Paul Nugent—in his blue M. Willett ball hat and blue Adidas T-shirt—steps out from the back. They are men so the level of discourse is low: a little scandalous chitchat, girls, insults about Paul's fishing abilities and Steve's waistline. The conversation just flows naturally along.

Eventually things run their course. Steve asks, “Need anything, Nuge?” And Nuge, who depends upon him for toner cartridges, floor, glass and hand cleaner, paper towels and stationery supplies, replies, “No—I'm good, buddy.” Steve is fifty-six and has never done anything other than a job that may be dying out. If his face registers a flicker of disappointment, it happens too quickly for me to see. Salesmen sell. Tomorrow he's in cottage country. He'll have a clean order book. The weather is supposed to be gorgeous.

CHAPTER
NINE